Emotion Detecting

This is hard enough for people let alone machines to be able to do it yet software development is having a crack at it. Led by computer scientists at the University of Rochester in New York. The software doesn't need to gather information about what is actually being said; it just analyzes the tone of voice. It accurately pinpoints emotions — including sadness, happiness, fear and disgust — 81 percent of the time in people whose voices it has previously analyzed. As with any software that uses data gathered from users, it can be used for fraud and scams. While it works well for people for whom it has received "training data" — samples of a person's voice that are labeled with the correct emotion — it's much less accurate at identifying emotions in a new person's voice. For people who are new to the software, it is able to detect the correct emotion 31 percent of the time. It wouldn't be practical to get training data from each person who would interact with the software, however. Researchers would have to catch recordings of people in the midst of talking angrily, happily and with every other emotion. Heinzelman wants to make a program that uses a limited set of training data to identify anybody's emotions.