Name: Affectiva's Mission is to Make Computers Emotionally Intelligent
Uploaded: 2018-10-19
Duration: 4 min 54 s
Description: CEO Rana el Kaliouby sits down with Fortune's Adam Lashinsky.

[ MUSIC ] Right, you founded a company around the concept of emotion AI, emotion artificial inteligence, what does that mean? That means we are trying to get computers to read and understand human emotions and become emotionally inteligent If you think about human intelligence, it's not just about your IQ, we all know that, it's really about your EQ. So people who have higher EQs tend to be more persuasive and likeable and more successful in their personal and professional lives. And I believe that that's true for AI as well. So if I hear you correctly, you're not focused on teaching AIs to have emotion. You're focused on teaching machines to read emotion. Exactly. So the way people communicate emotions is through facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, how fast you're speaking, how much energy there's in your voice. So we're using machine learning and tons of data to train algorithms to Identify your different facial expressions, vocal expressions, like if you're laughing or if you sound angry, and then make that information available in real time so that technology and devices could use that information for decision making. Why would I want to know these things? It sounds very interesting, but toward what commercial or otherwise? There are a lot of commercial applications for this technology I'll name a few, one is an advertizing research, so we work with 25 % of Fortune Gobal 500 companies and really at the core of it they wanna understand if they are emotionally engaging their consumers with their advertising Can you also use AI to hire people? Yes. We are partnered with a company called HireVue. They use video interviewing specifically optimized for companies that have to screen Tens of thousands of candidates for customer facing positions, where your non verbal communications and your soft skills are really important. What comes to mind listening to you immediately is that you're gonna be screening for people who smile, is that true or is it way more sophisticated? We actually found that it's not about the number of Smiles, or how many positive expressions you're showing, the better candidates tend to show a wider range of emotions. They big case study with Unilever, and they found that not only did they reduce the time to hire by 90 %, they increased the The diversity of the population that got hired by 16 %. Is there a downside to AI for hiring? Well, I think this type of approach to hiring works well when we really are looking for nonverbal behaviors and soft skills And it may be less important for other types of skills. I particularly am concerned with individuals on the autism spectrum, Mm- hm, mm- hm. Which are really at a disadvantage in terms of their social skills, right? So I wouldn't want them to be discriminated against with this type of technology. Can this technology also be used to detect people who have the wrong emotional responses? So for example, people who are depressed. Or people might have other very serious psychological issues. Yeah, this is one of the areas I'm extremely passionate about. The application of emotion AI to quantify mental health. When you walk into a doctor's office today, they don't ask you what your blood pressure is or what your temperature is. They just measure it. But in mental health, the gold standard is still on a scale from one to ten how depressed are you. It's very subjective data and this kind of technology can help us quantify it longitudinally and flag one when a person is showing signs of depression. There's clear facial and vocal bio markers for depression and Parkinson's and other mental health disorders. Interesting. [ MUSIC ] [ MUSIC ] It occurs to me that the first rudimentary, widespread examples of AI that we are now seeing in the marketplace are things like the Amazon Echo and the Google Home. Why aren't we seeing similar things in the workplace, and when will we? I think actually the fact that we're seeing more of these devices at home that's raising consumer expectations and so now we're expecting that enterprise intelligent virtual assistance need to be just as Cognitively intelligent and hopefully some day empathetic and emotionally intelligent too. So I definitely see that there's a spill over effect from consumer to enterprise. One area that we're focused a lot on as a company that's in the automotive industry, we're trying to understand distracted driving. Mm- hmm. Driver impairment like drowsiness. Or fatigue, or even annoyance and frustration, or cognitive overload, there's a lot of things happening within a vehicle. And understanding the emotional state of a driver is very important for safety purposes. Fascinating, thank you so much. Thank you. [ MUSIC ]

Affectiva's Mission is to Make Computers Emotionally Intelligent

CEO Rana el Kaliouby sits down with Fortune's Adam Lashinsky.