Emotional issue

An emotion-sensitive computer system that can detect customers’ anger or frustration and react accordingly could be used in BT call centres.

The UK telecoms giant is a partner in the EU-backed ERMIS project, which has created a prototype computer character able to understand and replicate a variety of human emotions. These range from straightforward anger through to more subtle states such as sadness or boredom.

The ERMIS team used its combined expertise in engineering, psychology and IT to analyse more than 400 features of everyday language. The researchers selected around 25 as being the most important in expressing emotion. These were fed into a neural network system, which combined all the different emotional cues, including facial expressions, to create the prototype character.

According to the team, the character was able to both react to and reproduce the emotional state of its human operator, and endeavoured to make the human user angry, happy, sad or even bored in return.