While computers have been able to understand human speech for quite some time, they haven’t been able to say anything about how the speaker is feeling.
By ADAM GONNThe science of emotions521(photo credit: Courtesy)
While computers have been able to understand human speech for quite some time, they haven’t been able to say anything about how the speaker is feeling.In May, however, after 18 years of research on 60,000 test subjects in 26 languages, Israel-based BeyondVerbal unveiled a software application that can extract, decode and understand a human’s full spectrum of emotions – including mood, attitude and emotional personality – all from the tone of one’s voice in real time.According to BeyondVerbal CEO Yuval Mor, vocal intonation is the gateway to people’s emotions, and the company’s patented technology adds a human emotional dimension not only to the way people interact with machines but also to the way people interact with each other.After all, in some cases, up to 90 percent of the total impact that a person makes when talking doesn’t come from the words he or she is using but rather from the way that he or she is saying them.BeyondVerbal’s team of physicists, neuropsychologists and decision-making experts has managed to decode the human intonation using 10-15 second voice segments. What they found was that emotions create universal patterns in all voice frequencies and intensities, which led to the establishment of socalled intonational code.While 10-15 seconds might seem like too short a period of time to be able to tell something about a person, Mor says that in most instances of human-to-human interaction, it only takes a person up to one minute to form an opinion about the other person.One application for BeyondVerbal’s software is to analyze how politicians feel when they are giving a speech, in real time. It can also be fitted into cars, so if a parent needs to tell the kids in the back to calm down, the app will recognize the distress in the voice of the driver and slow the car down.The software could also be used by call centers that want to manage their customer service staff, so that instead of having to go back and listen to recordings of conversations between the staff and customers, management could receive real-time information on the state of their workers. If someone is getting close to a level of irritation that might affect their professionalism, that employee could be taken out of rotation for a while.Since the field in which BeyondVerbal is active is completely new, the company has come up with the term Emotions Analytics to describe its work. The company hopes it will be able to leverage its unique capabilities, being the only technology capable of providing real-time, full-spectrum emotional analysis from natural, language agnostic, human vocal intonations, to dominate what they estimate to be a multi-billion dollar market of emotionally-enhanced applications installed in practically any voice-enabled, voice-activated and voicecontrolled device out there.BeyondVerbal has already licensed its technology and holds four US patents for partnerships in the fields of consumer applications, devices, appliances and software, to name a few.The first third-party mobile app using its application programming interface API is set to launch in the near future, while the company is preparing to launch a web tool that will allow people to use the platform to analyze voices.
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