Slashdot Mirror
Emotionally Aware Apps That Respond To Feelings Are On the Horizon
bigwophh writes: Machine learning has helped a multitude of different technologies become a reality, including emotion-detection. Most examples to date have been rather simple, such as being able to detect a smile or a frown. But with today's super-fast computers, and even mobile devices, we're now able to detect emotion with far greater accuracy and nuance. Facial recognition expert Rana el Kaliouby recently gave a talk at TED to highlight just how accurate emotion-detection has become, and depending on your perspective, the result is either amazing, or downright scary. To accurately detect someone's emotion, Rana's software detects eight different factors, which include frowning, showing disgust, engaged, and raised eyebrows, among other things. Through research with this software, a couple of interesting factoids are revealed. In the United States, women are 40% more likely to smile than men. But the technology is ultimately destined for software that will detect the user's emotion and react accordingly.
Well then, respond to THIS you APPLIANCE FROM HELL
*flips off monitor*
*flips off computer*
*flips off facial recognition cam*
*unplugs entire system from the wall*
*goes outside to work in the garden*
*later, sips a cold beer and falls asleep in the hammock, listening to the sound of chirping birds*
You can clearly see that "smile" is fake, but the thingamabob happily accepts it as joyous smile. Now, if it could detect the frown on my face from seeing these stupid, fluff-piece spamticles, on the other hand...
Great. All of our cutting-edge communications technology has brought use the 21st-century mood ring.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Outside of a conversational AI, I don't want my software to work differently depending on what mood it thinks I'm in. For every app that would actually benefit from this I foresee a hundred 'Clippy's.
'You seem frustrated! Let's start a tutorial of my basic features...'
'Hey—did you know you're angry? Here's some cute kittens that are sure to cheer you up!'
'I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over...'
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I recently determined that the problem with our ERP software is that it's not getting laid enough. Nothing makes it more difficult to concentrate on processing all those transactions than being all pent up like that. So on the minus side there's going to be more competition for Charlene in Marketing (And you KNOW the ERP software is a much smoother talker than you are) but on the plus side, we should start seeing a couple hundred thousand extra transactions per second as soon as this software gets installed!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I wonder if they'll be able to sense the level of contempt I have for them.
Remember, these aren't "apps" as in applications you use to achieve some life goal. Like the click through TOSes that you agree to, these will be one-sided, spying malware which you can't say "no" to because on the other side will be resources society now expects you to know about or use, FB being the classic example of such malware.
What tech companies have discovered is that the 20% of thoughtful, skeptical people in the population can be forced into submission by creating a world whose parameters and nature is defined by whatever the oblivious 80% will swallow, which is pretty much anything.
There use to be software or a process with a human that would listen in on tech support calls while the person was on hold. It would try to detect key words like cussing and so on to determine the level of upset the user was. It would then transfer the calls a little sooner than if they stayed in original queue.
I used to just start spouting random swear words in hopes of going to the front of the line. Had an employer catch me doing it once and was about ready to fire me until he found out why. Sometimes it appears to work, most of the time it just relieves some stress.