Soon,just from your voice,your smartphone will be able to tell if you're drunk!!

THE GOFER IN THE MACHINE

Successful virtual assistants need to know how their users feel. Mark Harris speaks to the programmers making them emotionally, as well as artificially, intelligent

Apple’s Siri, found on its iPhones and iPads, and Amazon’s Alexa, introduced on Echo, its voice-activated table-top speaker, might be the best-known examples; but there are now dozens of other such “virtual assistants” eager to hang upon your every word, including the much-hyped Viv, created by a new company founded by the engineers who designed Siri, which promises to be “an intelligent interface to everything”. 

Once a virtual assistant knows whether it is talking to a sarcastic teenager or a genial drunk, it can tailor its responses accordingly. Schuller has built an assistant called Aria that has none of the depth of knowledge manifested by commercial AIs like Siri or Cortana, but that appears intelligent because it responds to social and emotional cues. “Aria can keep up a conversation of half an hour or even more with random people off the street just by saying ‘Mmmm’, ‘Aha!’ or ‘Tell me more…’ at the right time,” says Schuller.

As assistants get smarter, more human and easier to talk to, we will inevitably share more of our own desires and fears with them. One day, we might even forget – or stop caring – that we are not talking to a real person at all but to an agent of corporations that do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. Long before then, happily, there are likely to be empathetic virtual assistants aplenty in whom to confide such troubling thoughts.

Source:The Economist

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