Artificial Intelli - Emotion?

Since when did computers have human emotion?!

To answer this question it's best to understand how far this technology has come with a trip back in time to the early 1900's: the first virtual assistant was created (commercially) in 1922. Radio Rex was a toy Dog that used electromagnets to listen for an audio trigger “Rex” which is the audio energy equivalent of 500Hz. Although an exciting time for toy maker Elmwood Button Co., Rex was far from accurate and didn’t seem to listen much at all. Go figure.

Technology has made many advancements since with the creation of voice assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and the Google’s, well, Google. With the touch of a button or signal of an audible catch phrase you can command your digital assistant to fetch you nearly any piece of information imaginable. Perhaps, you prefer a lovely bedtime read while you enjoy a glass of vino in the bubble bath? Admittedly AI has evolved to a point where the technology is getting closer to multi-sentence conversations or even share its best cheesy jokes. Although it’s human nature to long for a emotional bond with our digital assistant, “I’m sorry I do not understand..” responses quickly remind us that we are very different from our digital counterparts indeed.

Along our mental time travel I’m reminded of the U-Rent A Maid (XB-500) named Rosie who was the affordable robot maid and housekeeper for the Jetson family. In the futuristic era of flying cars, Rosie’s wheels helped her to move about freely when zipping off to clean up a mess and her ‘arms’ would even extend to catch a ball with the family.

Today we are able to use technology to understand feelings to turn social media metrics to optimize our well-being, enhance the digital assistant real-factor (if you will) and for animators to create even more relatable cartoon characters.

Hume creates a learning environment, in its research lab, to train computers (using A LOT of data) on how to understand human emotion. Better yet, to improve the human emotion experience. The best part, for me, is not the outcome. No. It's the strong ethical guidelines created by Hume in order to continue evolving computer-driving emotional intelligence in the safest way possible (otherwise, the Terminator is coming and trust me - no one wants that).

These learning models recognize non-verbal nuances in a highly accurate manner. I'm not talking about a smile - I'm talking about computers being able to accurately distinguish expressions of love over a sigh of relief.

I feel like a child in a candy store and I could get way out of hand (with this topic). So, let's stop here (for now). I reached out to Hume AI 's Communications Team so kindly cross your toes that they'll get back to me soon. Once that happens, we'll pick up where we left off and explore part two of this journey (I can't wait!).