“Emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.”- Travis Bradberry.
A key to effective performance and good relationships in the workspace is emotional intelligence. In businesses where this exists, it is way easier for employees to handle customers better, thus improving their experience.
The steady infusion of technology into the workplace, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI), gives birth to a new dimension of emotional intelligence we’ll like to call emotional AI.
Have you thought about what emotional AI means? Have you wondered how it can play a role in the workplace? This article would give answers to your questions.
What does Emotional AI mean?
Emotional AI refers to artificial intelligence that discovers and translates human emotional signals.
It refers to the use of artificial intelligence to detect and interpret the emotions of humans, with both verbal and nonverbal signs, this is also known as affective computing.
When you hear the words Emotional AI does your mind only think of detecting emotions through voice? Well, machines have been revolutionized to detect emotions with more than just voices.
Video signals are one-way machines that detect emotions. Machines can run facial expression analysis and gait analysis through video to analyze a person’s emotional state.
Physiological signals can also be used to detect emotions. Under the appropriate conditions, a person’s heart rate and respiration can be detected contactless with the use of a camera.
Ideally, the use of Emotional AI is to create a better atmosphere for businesses and customers alike. So, for business owners inculcating emotional AI into the workspace make sure to let your employees and customers know you have an AI installed and what it does, to make them comfortable.
Application and Uses of Emotional AI
Emotional AI can come in handy in a lot of areas, for systems that use emotional analysis they can acknowledge emotions and make decisions based on their analysis. Let’s look at a few applications of emotional AI:
- Education: With the use of AI, learning software prototypes have been developed to detect a child’s emotion when solving a problem or task. The AI program is meant to determine if a child is frustrated by the ease or difficulty of a task and adapt to make the task more challenging or less depending on the case.
- Medicine: Doctors can use AI voice analysis to detect patients with mental illnesses like depression or dementia.
Smart glasses have been created to help autistic patients understand and interpret emotions and social cues, by providing feedback on the emotions detected. In this case, AI serves as assisting technology.
- Games: The gaming industry seems to always be at the forefront when it comes to technology. With the aid of computer vision, the video console or game detects emotions through facial recognition and adapts to the detected emotion.
- Customer service: The use of AI makes it possible for conversational IVRs (interactive voice response) and chatbots to route calls to the right channels. If it detects anger in a customer’s tone, it escalates to the right bot channel or a human.
- Automobile: Automotive AI is being built to identify human emotions such as rage or absent-mindedness, it then takes control over or stops the automobile, thus warding off accidents or acts of road rage.
- Business: Smart CCTV cameras can be installed in retail shops to record customers’ expressions and reactions to products, prices, changes and more to help them reform their range and prices.
- Home: VPA enabled speakers with the aid of emotional AI can detect the emotion of the person with who it’s interacting and respond accordingly.
- Recruiting: Company’s use emotional AI to determine the credibility of prospective employees.
- Worker Safety: Employees who have very high demanding jobs, such as first responders have high-stress levels with the help of emotional AI the anxiety and stress levels of such employees can be detected and put in check.
- Patient care: Emotional AI can be used to remind older patients of their medication and also converse with them to keep them company and monitor their overall well-being.
Read: Improved Work Environment: AI-enabled employee experience
The use and application of emotional AI are fast becoming inexhaustible. With the right developers and software, emotional AI would soon be integrated into every aspect of our lives.
Remember, emotional intelligence is not the opposite of Intelligence, it is not the triumph of heart over head. It is the unique intersection of both and AI infusion creates a finer use of both.
