Have you ever heard of emotion artificial intelligence (AI)? Emotion AI, or affective AI, is a field of computer science that helps machines gain an understanding of human emotions. The MIT Media Lab and Dr. Rosalind Picard are the premier innovators in this space. Through their work, they sparked the idea to help machines develop empathy. Empathy is a complex concept with a lot of strings attached to it, but on a basic level, it means having an understanding of another person's emotional states.

AI has been reigning in the industries and business ecosystems with its unending capabilities to accelerate automation and provide business intelligence. Disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, etc. have enabled companies to create better user experiences and advance business growth. Emotional AI is a rather recent development in the field of modern technology, and it claims that AI systems can read facial expressions and analyze human emotions. This method is also known as affect recognition technology. Recently Article 19, a British human rights organization published a report stating the increasing use of AI-based emotion recognition technology in China by the law enforcement authorities, corporate bodies, and the state itself.

When I was a teenager, I used to enjoy watching a weekly television programme called "Lost in Space". In this science fiction series, a robot having a male identity was used as one of the main characters. He spoke perfect English but his speech sounded monotonic and dull – devoid of inflexions, and variations of volume and tone. This depiction of robots as sounding devoid of human emotions was not uncommon at that time – perhaps film producers felt the need to reinforce the differences between humans and machines. However, in a recent film called Her (released in 2014), the main character, named Theodore, uses an AI operating system that speaks conversational language.

When Eugenia Kuyda created her chatbot, Replika, she wanted it to stand out among the voice assistants and home robots that had begun to take root in peoples lives. Sure, AI made it possible to schedule an appointment or get the weather forecast by barking into your phone. But where was an AI you could simply talk to about your day? Siri and the rest were like your co-workers, all business. Replika would be like your best friend.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have created a device that can read human emotions using wireless signals. The EQ-Radio reads subtle changes in breathing and heart rhythms to figure out if a person is happy, excited, angry or sad. The device measures heartbeats like an ECG monitor with a margin of error of 0.3 percent. It then analyzes the waveforms within each heartbeat to determine the person's emotion. "Our work shows that wireless signals can capture information about human behavior that is not always visible to the naked eye," project lead Dina Katabi, who co-wrote a paper on the topic with PhD students Mingmin Zhao and Fadel Adib, said in a statement Tuesday.