Artificial intelligence (AI) has, in one way or another, been incorporated into many people’s daily lives. The global market size for AI was US$12 billion in 2018, with continued growth to US$91 billion expected by 2024. The current iteration of AI is called Weak AI, even though it has made remarkable progress in translation, autonomous driving, and image recognition. According to researchers, while Weak AI has the functions of logic solving, reasoning, and optimization, the upcoming technology iterations (dubbed Strong AI) will have the “sensitivity to understand emotion and have the ability to create new things to think like humans and act like humans.” 

Used in various fields, from simply increasing the convenience of work to creating artwork using artificial intelligence technology, this Strong AI is being actively studied concerning the human emotional field. In a paper presented at the 2022 IEEE/ACIS Conference on Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Data Science, researchers examine the status of artificial emotional intelligence technology. 

AI is already creating new things that are not just seen, copied, or synthesized in art, music, and video, and some AI is at a stage where human emotions can be understood, recognized, and used in real applications. Advanced further, AI technology will create a new business ecosystem. In the paper, the researchers start with the current status of the research on emotion, outlining how human emotions have been developed in various fields such as emotional engineering, emotional science, human-computer interaction (HCI), and emotional computing.

Emotional Intelligence and Artificial Sensitivity Intelligence

“Artificial emotional intelligence technology is currently being carried out as a frame of emotion recognition, emotion generation, and emotion enhancement technology.” According to the researchers, the most used means of recognizing a person’s emotional expression is the expression and voice of a person. In addition, biological signals such as human posture, gestures, gait, heart rate, and brain waves are being analyzed. To be effective, AI must generate immediate and automatic emotional responses to specific patterns from external stimuli. In other words, emotion generation requires synthesizing actions that can represent the emotional state of artificial intelligence. 

Key Areas of Artificial Emotional Intelligence Technology

 

The Emotional Intelligence Industry

The future potential of artificial emotional intelligence highlights the importance of examining which factors will be necessary for the industrialization of artificial emotional intelligence, as is discussed in the paper. The authors also identify four industries (with examples) that have seen substantial advances in artificial emotional intelligence technology:

  • Healthcare: Recent advances in wearable devices and artificial intelligence speakers enable people to measure brain waves, breathing, movement, and voice, and technologies are being developed to identify people’s emotional and health conditions.
  • Automobile: With the development of autonomous driving technology, ‘Emotional Driving,’ in which cars and passengers communicate, has recently become a key concept for future vehicles in the automobile industry. 
  • Education: As daily life became non-face-to-face due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the education field has had to evolve with new AI technology to increase participation and meet the individual needs of various student groups.
  • Service: AI technology is being developed to customize the shopping experience based on machine learning, deep learning, and graphic technologies. 

The researchers note that the developing emotion generation (synthesis) and emotion enhancement technology will be important as AI evolves. In addition, there is a need for infrastructure and platforms to provide solutions to various ethical problems that may arise from artificial emotional intelligence.

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