It's going to be emotional

Have you ever had the urge to throw your computer out of the window? The root cause of such emotional outbursts is often the fact that machines exhibit no empathy. For all the technological advances in computational power, ability to process data on a massive scale and an increasing improvements in AI, the devices and software we interact with on a daily basis remains largely emotionally inert. This could be about to change as a result of dramatic progress in the field of affective computing – the branch of computer science concerned with enabling the recognition, interpretation, processing and simulation of human emotion. The field is not new – it gained prominence through research lead by Rosalind Picard at the MIT media in the 1990s – but recent developments spanning neuroscience, psychology, software development and robotics mean that today's businesses now have the capability to engage employees and customers at an emotional level, creating new opportunities for human machine interaction and symbiotic working.