Researchers are figuring out how to make virtual assistants understand your feelings

Alicia Vikander in "Ex Machina," a sci-fi thriller about an eccentric inventor who designs artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is all about getting a machine to mimic a human in every way: thought, speech, movement. That's why one of the tests for AI is the Turing test: whether a robot can fool a human into thinking it is conversing with another of its own species. An integral part of accomplishing this is making the AI recognize human emotions. So one research lab is working on the next iteration of virtual assistants, those that can recognize and react to emotional cues.