A blank stare and dark face, just like in the movie Red Heat: Russians are global leaders in hiding their emotions. But a new generation of tech entrepreneurs is trying to get under the tough guys' skin and also inside their brains. Among pioneers of emotional intelligent tech in Russia are Moscow-based startups Neurodata Lab and NTechLab. Rosbank, a subsidiary of Paris-based Société Générale financial group, is now testing an emotion recognition technology developed by Neurodata Lab at its call centers. The solution calculates a "Customer Satisfaction Index" in real time by analyzing both voice and speech.

Russian startup Promobot is now selling autonomous androids -- and buyers can choose to make the robots look like any person on Earth. "Everyone will now be able to order a robot with any appearance -- for professional or personal use," Aleksei Iuzhakov, Chairman of Promobot's Board of Directors, said in a press release, later encouraging people to "imagine a replica of Michael Jordan selling basketball uniforms and William Shakespeare reading his own texts in a museum." Promobot's Robo-C can't walk, but its neck and torso each have three degrees of freedom of movement, according to the startup's website. Its face has 18 moving parts, which allow the robot to produce 600 micro-expressions, and its AI boasts 100,000 speech modules. "The key moment in development [of Robo-C] is the digitization of personality and the creation of an individual appearance," Promobot co-founder Oleg Kivokurtsev told CNBC.