Chinese telecom firm Huawei has reportedly been planning to build an AI-driven voice assistant that can identify and understand human emotions. The company’s effort comes on the heels of the general perception that though Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri are functional digital assistants designed to inform & take user instructions, they cannot determine the user’s feeling in a particular situation.
If sources are to be believed, Huawei seems to be attempting to eliminate this limitation in its AI assistant. The company may soon develop a new software for the assistant, which will help it to interact emotionally with humans. Apparently, through the understanding of human emotions, Huawei’s AI assistant can provide more natural language-driven outcomes as well as predictive suggestions that are presently not possible to be deployed on any mobile tool.
Felix Zhang, the VP of software engineering division at Huawei, has stated that the firm is keen on offering emotional exchanges with the customers and its AI assistant can offer them with this facility. As per experts, the move will help the Chinese telecom giant to establish a unique position as opposed to its potential rivals.
Allegedly, the addition of new features such as emotion-sensing ability to the virtual personal assistants will help them examine the consumer behavior data captured via facial expressions, body language, behavior, and voice intonation. According to James Lu, the director of AI product management at the consumer business unit in Huawei, has declared that the firm’s AI assistant equipped with new features will try to maintain seamless interaction with the end user. He further added that the manufacturers will first program the product with a high intelligence quotient, post which they will again program the same to provide a high emotional quotient.
Incidentally, Microsoft had recently declared that Xiaoice, its social chatbot, now is endowed with the capability to talk like humans. Experts state that this would be another of those potential challenges for tech giants.