Wearable AI that can detect the tone of a conversation

It's a fact of nature that a single conversation can be interpreted in very different ways. For people with anxiety or conditions like Asperger's, this can make social situations extremely stressful. But what if there was a more objective way to measure and understand our interactions? Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) say that they've gotten closer to a potential solution: an artificially intelligent wearable system that can predict if a conversation is happy, sad or neutral based on a person's speech patterns and vitals. "Imagine if, at the end of a conversation, you could rewind it and see the moments when the people around you felt the most anxious," says graduate student Tuka Alhanai, who co-authored a related paper with PhD candidate Mohammad Ghassemi that they will present at next week's Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in San Francisco.