Huawei working on virtual assistant capable of doing emotional interactions

Did you watch the movie ‘Her‘? For starters, the movie shows a human falling in love with an emotionally intelligent computer software. Well, those of you who thought the concept is too good to true, Huawei may prove it’s possible.

The Chinese smartphone manufacturer has revealed it’s working on an artificial intelligence technology that is aimed at bringing emotional touch to the interaction between humans and voice assistants.

The technology is referred to as “emotion AI,” and is defined as the ability for a software to detect a user’s mood and respond accordingly.

Here’s what Felix Zhang, vice president of software engineering at Huawei’s consumer business group, told CNBC.

We want to provide emotional interactions

We think that, in the future, all our end users wish [that] they can interact with the system in the emotional mode. This is the direction we see in the long run

Huawei’s idea is to bake emotion AI in a way that the interaction continues for as long as the user wants (so that they do not feel alone). While the company didn’t provide a specific time line, it did say the emotion-based AI software will be released in the near future.

Zhang also predicted that smartphones of future will work using voice commands – no touch required.

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