The way AI is advancing, we should prepare ourselves for the future where we will coexist with machines that will imitate human behavior and perception. While the work for such a future is already a reality, this disruptive technology won’t just be able to capture the human element by the virtue of automation and decision-making but will also be able to emote like humans and read emotions accurately. That’s the road to emotional AI or emotional artificial intelligence.
The process of building a layer of EQ or emotional quotient on top of artificial intelligence is called affective computing. How does this work? For an AI program to demonstrate emotions (to become an emotional AI program), it needs to see emotions, hear our voices, and feel our anxiety. For this, emotional AI must be able to extract emotional data from humans through conversational means by eye-tracking, skin response, voice, and written word analysis, brain activity via EEG, facial mapping, etc.
This technology can be used for hiring talent, sports personality traits analysis, advertising, marketing, event planning, predicting purchase behavior, finding a companion, security, amongst many others. Here is a list of the top 15 global emotional AI companies that are creating a global disruption.
Promobot + Neurodata Lab
Promobot is an autonomous service robot for business and is designed to work in places that have an increased concentration of people, and helps people with navigation as it autonomously moves, communicates, and answers any questions. The company in collaboration with Neurodata Lab, an Emotion AI hub is enabling the robot to better understand and interpret human emotions, and engage in human-like conversations and interactions.
Promobot shows promotional materials and remembers everyone it has communication with. Promobot is programmed to work as an administrator, museum guide, promoter, and host. Promobot can operate in crowded places like cinemas, convention centers, exhibition halls, museums, shopping malls, business centers. Promobot’s increased applications can boost the quality of service, financial performance, and customer loyalty of companies where these robots operate.
Emotibot
Founded in 2015, by Mr.Kenny Chien and two angel investors, Emoitbot brings the unlimited potential of AI technology to achieve higher business values. Emoitbot is the only artificial intelligence company with image, language multimodal emotion recognition technology, and voice triple human-computer interaction technology. Emotibot aims to build an Artificial Intelligence companion that can read, see, listen, remember, self-learn, and understands the user’s emotion to understand the affective states, emotions, and intentions of the speaker. Through automatic learning of user preferences and habits, Emotibot’s AI bots provide users with over 30 services and functions like travel planning, hotel reservations, and so on. The platform supports fast access to mobile phones, websites, App, intelligent devices with an aim to closely connect people with the world.
Affectiva
Affectiva is an emotion measurement technology company incepted and developed at MIT’s Media Lab to recognize human emotions based on facial cues or physiological responses. This emotion recognition technology is used to commercially help brands improve their marketing messages and advertising targets. Affectiva partnered with Millward Brown, in 2011 for political polling estimates. The company’s technology enables software applications to use a webcam in order to track a user’s smirks, furrows, smile, and frowns to measure the levels of surprise, confusion, and amusement. Affectiva’s technology allows a person’s heart rate to be measured from a webcam without the need of the user to wear a sensor. This is accomplished by tracking the color changes in the person’s face, which pulses each time the heartbeats.
Affectiva’s Affdex technology can be used to train a webcam on users while they are watching ads, to track their furrows, smirks, smiles, and frowns to measure their levels of surprise, amusement, or confusion throughout a commercial. This helps for a comparison with other viewers across different demographics. The company has developed the first online face tracking system for an evaluation of the advertising effectiveness, a technology, whose clients include Coca-Cola and others.
Beyond Verbal
Founded in 2012, Beyond Verbal based in Tel Aviv, Israel uses Voice and AI technology to extract human emotions and reveal Vocal Biomarkers including acoustic features which indicate various health conditions. Beyond Verbal has collaborated with leading medical institutions, to perform multiple clinical trials and conducts Big Data projects aimed at revealing signs of pulmonary, neurological, cardiovascular, and other diseases and chronic medical conditions in the voice thus allowing continuous patient monitoring and predictive analytics.
NVISO
NVISO is an artificial intelligence company founded in 2009 and headquartered in Switzerland.
NVISO specializes in applying Artificial Visual Intelligence and Deep Learning to accurately detect and predict human emotions and behaviors across a range of industries including Finance, Automotive, and Healthcare across all devices. NVISO provides artificial intelligence solutions that can sense, comprehend and act upon human behavior using emotion analytics.
NVISO’s products and services consist of applications, software development kits (SDK’s), and data services. These are used by NVISO customers to measure and increase productivity and to accurately perform specific business functions, such as the automation of customer-facing operations. NVISO commercialization is focused on AI solutions for several key industries.
Cynny S.p.a.
Cynny, founded in 2013, has its headquarters in Florence, Italy, and offices in the UK, The USA, and China. Cynny is working on developing MorphCast, a premium adaptive video format that delivers face recognition in a smartphone without the need for an app or plugin, fuelled by deep neural network technology that enables real-time content-engagement triggers, maintaining the privacy of the viewer’s data. Cynny was built upon the premise that the processing capabilities of mobile devices would increase rapidly, enabling companies to create new types of personalized video-based experiences, within the device’s browser. Since its inception, Cynny has developed technologies that deliver high market potential with its USP MorphCast® which is changing the rules of marketing in the adaptive era of advertising.
Entropik Technologies
Established in the year 2016, Entropic Technologies based in Bengaluru puts the vision forward to create a world that is not just artificially intelligent but also emotionally perceptive. Entropik Technology is a unique EmotionAI startup that assists brands to measure the cognitive and emotional response of consumers towards the content or product experiences. The platform additionally optimizes these experiences to resonate emotionally with the consumer.
Entropic Technologies is a part of the Viacom18 VStep, SAP, Accenture Ventures Cohort, and Plug n Play accelerator programs. In a report published by Gartner, Entropic Technologies is also named as one of the Top 5 cool vendors in AI in India.
Human (wearehuman.io)
Human founded in 2016, brings data scientists, microexpression coders, and psychologists who work together to build the next step in the human-tech relationship. With offices in the UK, China, and the US, Human leverages Artificial Emotional Intelligence, machine learning to understand characteristics, feelings, emotions, and personality traits of an individual with minimum human bias. The company offers solutions into Recruiting & Employee Retention, Professional Sports Intelligence, Security Detection, Financial Fraud Detection, Sales Prediction, Customer Satisfaction Analysis, Dating EQ, and many other verticals.
CrowdEmotion
CrowdEmotion founded in 2013 and based in London, the UK is an emotion-inspired artificial intelligence Company leveraging technology to hear, feel and see, the way humans do. The company’s proprietary emotion engine helps companies, academics, and users to recognize human emotion with an aim to deliver a better experience and life for users. CrowdEmotion has won many awards that help people and technology come closer together in a natural way. CrowdEmotion’s API can mainly be applied to digital experiences, security, autonomous vehicles, and healthcare solutions.
Mad Street Den
Founded in 2013 and based out of the San Francisco Bay Area, Mad Street Den is a Computer Vision-based Artificial Intelligence startup that is breaking new grounds and setting trends to redefine the future of Retail. Vue.ai is the company’s first vertically integrated AI stack for the Retail industry. The AI stack provides 360* solutions for the entire Retail value chain with products that support onsite, in-app experience to marketing & social channels to operations and automation. Besides retail, MAD Stack, Mad Street Den’s Computer Vision platform integrates AI capabilities like object recognition, expression/emotion recognition with more capabilities added as development progresses.
With a core team of Deep Learning experts, Neuroscientists, Data Science specialists from Stanford, CMU, and MSFT labs, Mad Street Den has been serving reputed brands as its customers across nationalities including the US, the UK, India, Middle East, and Latin America regions.
MusiMap
Musimap is an emotional AI company that is leveraging 20 years of manual tagging efforts. The company aims to add value to the music we listen to with so many years of research expertise, audio processing, and artificial intelligence that the company owns the largest annotated music databases in the world. Musimap has created a technology that is described as a “psycho-emotional profiling engine” called Musime. This technology generated an emotional profile for listeners, detailing their mood, feelings, and values based on their listening history. Its APIs utilize the proprietary databases within fractions of a second to provide clients with unique emotional intelligence. This emotional AI company can cater to music companies and publishers, in-store music providers, audio and video streaming companies, radio stations, various e-commerce platforms, etc.
NuraLogix
Founded in Toronto, NuraLogix developed a technology to read human emotions to an extent that it can detect lying. The company developed a technique called Transdermal Optical Imaging that can read the human emotional state. The technique uses a video camera to extract information from the blood flow. This emotional AI company’s applications can be found in domains like marketing, research, and health.
Emoshape
Emoshape is a New York-based emotional AI company that has developed an Emotional Processing Unit (EPU). According to the company, their EPU can provide intelligence devices like robots, self-driving cars, effective toys, etc with the ability to interact with humans. The EPU is a chip that uses algorithms to detect any combination of 12 primary emotions. This enables any intelligent device to understand 64 trillion unique emotional states.
BRAIQ
This is another New York-based emotional AI startup, founded in 2016. This company has developed a technology that can read your feelings about the autonomous car that is driving you around. While most autonomous car companies design their vehicles on the basis of how the vehicle interacts with its surroundings, BRAIQ aims to look into how these cars should interact with the passengers. According to a survey, about 75% of American’s are scared of self-driving cars. BRAIQ hopes to change this mistrust into trust with their technology that can read human’s emotional signals to ensure that the passenger enjoys the ride.
Receptiviti
Not just your tone of voice, what you write can also express your feelings, this is the concept of a Toronto-based startup called Receptivi. This emotional AI company developed a proprietary technology called Linguistic Inquiry and Work Cunt which gathers insights about your character, emotions, and decision-making by taking a look at what you write. This technology uses NLP to capture people’s emotions, psychology, and social concerns. The applications of Receptivi’s technology can be used to make chatbots function better, or perform serious psychological analysis that can be used in multiple fields.
Personalyze
Personalyze is an AI-driven people analytics company that has created the world’s most powerful profiling technology on individuals across all social and digital platforms. The company aims to help other companies understand their customers in a better way. Personalyze’s technology consists of two profiling technologies, social intelligence and emotional intelligence that can analyze people and their social footprint in real-time. In addition to that, the technology’s algorithm can examine people’s personalities by what the online content they consume which has similar accuracy to a 60-minute written psychometric test.
Source-Analyticsinsight.net