Are you 80% angry and 2% sad? Why 'emotional AI' is fraught with problems

It's Wednesday evening and I'm at my kitchen table, scowling into my laptop as I pour all the bile I can muster into three little words: "I love you." My neighbours might assume I'm engaged in a melodramatic call to an ex-partner, or perhaps some kind of acting exercise, but I'm actually testing the limits of a new demo from Hume, a Manhattan-based startup that claims to have developed "the world's first voice AI with emotional intelligence". "We train a large language model that also understands your tone of voice," says Hume's CEO and chief scientist Alan Cowen. "What that enables… is to be able to predict how a given speech utterance or sentence will evoke patterns of emotion." In other words, Hume claims to recognise the emotion in our voices (and in another, non-public version, facial expressions) and respond empathically.