MIT built a wearable app to detect emotion in conversation

How a person tells a story could be interpreted in a multitude of ways -- telling your friend about your awesome new car can come across as excitement or a brag, depending on the listener. To help detect the sentiment behind speech, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a wearable app that can parse conversation to identify the emotion behind each part of the story. The app, built into a fitness tracker for this research, collects physical and speech data to analyze the overall tone of the story in real time. Using artificial intelligence, the app can also figure out which part of the conversation was happy or sad, and tracks emotional changes in five-second intervals. In the research, participants were asked to wear a Samsung Simband with the app installed and tell a story.