Artificial intelligence is all around. Tech giants and startups are cultivating their AI technology to create better ways of living such as riding on driverless cars and making payment by scanning your face. While this lies on the grounds that AI's practical skills can ultimately replace human labor, one startup believes that AI can be an emotional companion to human. Shanghai-based startup Emotibot made an AI-powered bot that can complete practical tasks as well as have a conversation with you. Corporates who want more customer interaction are in talk with the company to source their technology to humanize their online customer service.

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Emotional intelligence is a hard thing to achieve, even in humans. But it's especially difficult in robots, and maybe even more so in chatbots, whose available tools for picking up on emotional cues are quite limited. Emotibot is a Chinese startup focused on making sure personal assistants, chatbots and virtual customer service agents can accurately understand the emotional state of people they're dealing with. Having someone respect your emotions while dealing with any kind of customer service interaction, you might know from personal experience, can make a huge difference in quality of service. Bots right now are pretty emotionally stunted; some can crack jokes, pulling from a pre-programmed pool of one-liners, but few, if any, can detect that you might not be in the best of moods for hearing a wisecrack and instead opting for a more sympathetic response.