---
title: "Amazon Is Teaching Alexa to Analyze Your Emotions"
description: "A new type of AI built by Amazon's Alexa team is better at picking up on emotions when people are talking. It could help Alexa better understand people."
date: "2019-05-21"
modified: "2019-05-21"
authors:
  - name: "Dan Robitzski"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/danrobitzski"
url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-alexa-analyzing-emotions"
categories:
  - "Artificial Intelligence"
tags:
  - "Alexa"
  - "Amazon"
  - "artifiical intelligence"
  - "the digest"
---

# Amazon Is Teaching Alexa to Analyze Your Emotions

![A new type of AI built by Amazon's Alexa team is better at picking up on emotions when people are talking. It could help Alexa better understand people.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/amazon-alexa-analyzing-emotions.png>)
*\<em\>Image: Victor Tangermann\</em\>*

## 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](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-alexa-echo-kids-privacy>), Amazon developed a more effective way to teach Alexa to scan people's voices for signs of emotions, [according to *VentureBeat*](<https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/21/amazons-ai-improves-emotion-detection-in-voices/>). 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](<https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/2d8c2128-eec9-44cc-9274-444940eb0a4d/using-adversarial-training-to-recognize-speakers-emotions>) 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](<https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/21/amazons-ai-improves-emotion-detection-in-voices/>) \[*VentureBeat*\]

**More on Alexa:** *[Amazon Workers Listen to Your Alexa Conversations, Then Mock Them](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-listen-share-alexa-recordings>)*

## Author
Dan Robitzki is a senior reporter for Futurism, where he likes to cover AI, tech ethics, and medicine. He spends his extra time fencing and streaming games from Los Angeles, California.

### Author social links  
[Twitter](<https://x.com/danrobitzski>)