In the frame of VOICE Summit 2019, the world’s largest voice-tech conference where our CTO & Co-founder, Alex Potamianos spoke, he also wrote a guest spot on how Voice Reveals More About Your Emotions. In his article, he refers to emotional honesty, the human ability to capture subtle nuances in speech, empathy in a digital world, and what does the latter means for voice assistants and AI. Body language, facial expressions, and mostly the tone of our voice reveal a lot about our emotions. And no matter how hard sometimes we try to hide them, it is difficult to fake for long.

Capturing subtle nuances in speech

The article focusses on the human brain and its capability to decipher and code information that receives from voice far more from other non-linguistic expressions like body language and facial expressions. That means that our sense of hearing is more acute at detecting emotions in a conversation. Alex, bases that on a recent study by Michael Kraus (among others), and to Joe Navarro and his book What Every Body is Saying, which claims that our face is the least truthful part of our body.

No Voice, no empathy

Furthermore, Alex Potamianos, emphasizes how much we skip voice in our day to day communications, preferring text for most of our interactions with others, making our connections poorer. ”What impact does this digital transition have on our ability to feel empathy and truly connect? The majority of the emotional expressiveness in lost in text (and is only partially recovered via the use of emoticons in texting or emailing).”

In addition, an interesting experiment by Jean-Julien Aucouturier at CNRS in France, where people are asked to read and record an innocuous story, comes to highlight the deep emotional impact different speaking styles have.

What this means for voice assistants and AI

In conclusion, words are the tip of the iceberg in a conversation, and that’s where Emotion AI can play an important role. ”With the use of Emotion AI, we can improve the performance of customer service and sales teams, build more responsive personal voice assistants and leverage unstructured data in new and exciting ways across all industries. This is all possible with the advances in technology around conversational AI”.

Read more on how Voice Reveals More About Your Emotions at VOICE

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