Microsoft is removing emotion recognition features from its facial recognition tech

When Microsoft announced last week it will remove several features from its facial recognition technology that deal with emotion, the head of its responsible artificial intelligence efforts included a warning: The science of emotion is far from settled. "Experts inside and outside the company have highlighted the lack of scientific consensus on the definition of'emotions,' the challenges in how inferences generalize across use cases, regions, and demographics, and the heightened privacy concerns around this type of capability," Natasha Crampton, Microsoft's chief responsible AI officer, wrote in a blog post. Microsoft's move, which came as part of a broader announcement about its "Responsible AI Standard" initiative, immediately became the most high-profile example of a company moving away from emotion recognition AI, a relatively small piece of technology that has been the focus of intense criticism, particularly in the academic community. Emotion recognition technology typically relies on software to look at any number of qualities -- facial expressions, tone of voice or word choice -- in an effort to automatically detect emotional state. Many technology companies have released software that claims to be able to read, recognize or measure emotions for use in business, education and customer service.