Amazon Is Teaching Alexa to Analyze Your Emotions

What could possibly go wrong?

Emotional Intelligence

Amazon researchers think they've found a better way to make emotionally-savvy artificial intelligence.

In the ongoing quest to make smart assistant Alexa better understand the humans with whom it interacts, Amazon developed a more effective way to teach Alexa to scan people's voices for signs of emotions, according to VentureBeat. The upgrade suggests that smart assistants may soon be able to understand humanity's wants and needs better than ever before — and, realistically, use it to sell you things.

Automated Learning

Compared to a conventional algorithm, the new self-teaching Alexa AI is three percent more accurate when determining the emotions being expressed in a sentence, according to a blog post by the Amazon scientists who built the algorithm.

When the sentence was broken down into 20-millisecond chunks, the new AI system was four percent better than the original.

Small Steps

In this initial test, there wasn't a huge improvement over the original.

But the fact that this new type of algorithm immediately performed better than the tried-and-true method suggests that future projects could bring about a truly emotionally-intelligent — maybe even empathetic — smart assistant.

READ MORE: Amazon’s AI improves emotion detection in voices [VentureBeat]

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