AI Emotion-Detection Arms Race
Voice systems are increasingly using AI techniques to determine emotion. A new paper describes an AI-based countermeasure to mask emotion in spoken words.
Their method for masking emotion involves collecting speech, analyzing it, and extracting emotional features from the raw signal. Next, an AI program trains on this signal and replaces the emotional indicators in speech, flattening them. Finally, a voice synthesizer re-generates the normalized speech using the AIs outputs, which gets sent to the cloud. The researchers say that this method reduced emotional identification by 96 percent in an experiment, although speech recognition accuracy decreased, with a word error rate of 35 percent.
Academic paper.
Winter • August 29, 2019 7:18 AM
I can see the potential abuse of automatic detection of emotion. However, this is not different from human emotion detection.
The expression of human emotions in their speech has evolved to ease communication. This is extremely important. So important that pure text based communication developed kludges to simulate emotion, e.g., emojis.
When automatic dialog systems can detect the emotions, human machine interaction will improve considerably.
In the balance, I think the benefits will strongly outweigh the dangers.