Americans can finally understand British humour! Scientists develop a device that can detect when someone is being sarcastic

Our friends from across the pond have been known to struggle with British sarcasm on occasion. But improved Anglo-American relations may be on the horizon, as experts have developed a device that can detect when someone is being sarcastic. A team from the University of Groningen have created an algorithm that analyses someone's speech to work out if they are using irony. It works by examining the pitch, talking rate and energy in speech, and then transcribing the speech into text for it to be analysed further for language cues. 'We extracted acoustic parameters such as pitch, speaking rate, and energy from speech, then used Automatic Speech Recognition to transcribe the speech into text for sentiment analysis,' author Xiyuan Gao said.