Can chatbots learn to understand human emotions?

Welcome to the American Banker Podcast, I’m Penny Crosman. Can AI be trained to decipher human emotions? Dr. Aniket Bera, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, is an expert on what’s called affective computing using machine learning and other computer science methods to program artificial intelligence programs to better understand human behavior and emotion. He’s here with us today to tell us about some of the projects he’s been working on and how AI used in the financial services industry might be able to detect feelings, for instance, when a customer is angry or depressed or even when an employee is upset or about to commit fraud. Welcome Dr. Bera.

Dr. Aniket Bera (00:46):

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Penny Crosman (00:48):

Sure. Can you tell us how you got into this kind of work?

Dr. Aniket Bera (00:52):

So we’ve been working on this research for quite some time, even before AI or artificial intelligence sort of took over our tech landscape, so to speak. We’ve been working on a lot of these applications around robotics, computer graphics, natural language processing, and all of them, five, six years ago, we were looking at some of these technologies and we found that one key ingredient was really missing in all of them and that was bringing in the human angle to it. So to give you a good example, if there was a robot dog or there was a virtual therapist, virtual doctor, or you, you’re talking to the next version of let’s say chat box. So we found out that a lot of these technologies are being used at large scale by many companies across different sectors, but they are lack a key ingredient of communication and that is human affect or human emotions.

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