Technology Can Sense What We Want
How artificial intelligence can tap into our emotions to sell us pretty much anything
“OMG! Can you stop typing with your Caps Lock on? It feels like you’re screaming at me!”
With technology taking over our lives, and by no means is that an exaggeration, we have evolved how we communicate over technology with one another. Still, we often we still find ourselves complaining that we are being misunderstood by the human on the other side. But what if technology itself understand us better? It certainly seems to know what we want, most of the time. What if it could interpret our emotions? And what if it could impact our decisions?
A marketer’s dream? Actually, marketers reality.
It’s not rocket science that emotion lies at the core of effective marketing. Consumers tend to rely more on their emotions than anything else to make brand purchase decisions. To be able to engage with the audience at an emotional level, it’s imperative to first understand emotions.
On a fundamental level, emotions are responses that occur in the brain and tend to alter our physical state. e.g., change in expression, voice tone, body language, blood flow, temperature and so on. As a result, one must make this physicality measurable and possible for technology to quantify. Feelings are our minds interpreting these emotions, backed by experiences, associations, context, memories and so on. Marketers leverage these feelings and nudge us to take actions.
Which brings us to emotionally intelligent technology, a rapidly evolving branch of artificial intelligence (AI) — technology built to simulate human intelligence and behaviour. What’s even more intriguing is that AI allows computers to learn and interpret on their own, when exposed to new information. They are able to detect patterns from diverse and unstructured data.
Currently the tech world is exploring various aspects of injecting emotions into AI to make it more humanlike. From detecting and interpreting emotions to even responding emotionally. Real-time video can capture changes in facial cues to read emotion. In fact, MIT’s Media Lab startup Affectiva’s Emotion AI can interpret anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise. Add voice analysis to the mix, and AI gets even more smarter. It can learn about how you feel by studying voice modulation, tone, tempo, pitch etc. IBM’s Tone Analyzer is able to pick up seven different kinds of voice tones including excitement, frustration and sympathy. It is used to monitor customer service calls, to help human agents and even bots improve the quality of conversation.
If this seems a bit too sci-fi for you then hold on to your seats, EQ-Radio from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab can tap into hidden emotions using wireless signals reflected off a person’s body to capture heartbeat and respiratory information. Talk about taking away the power from remaining silent and holding a perfect pokerface! Technology can still figure out what you’re feeling.
So fine, AI understands our emotions. But now what?
Well the keys lies here, when technology responds taking these emotions into consideration. That is empathise. Just in like in human to human interactions, where empathy builds trust; when machines are trained to recognise social signals from people and respond appropriately, it’s known as Artificial Empathy. These specifically crafted responses are a goldmine for marketers. Be it campaigns or customising suggestions to shoppers, AI can get people to buy products or experiences they’d ordinarily dismiss.
What’s exciting, or perhaps creepy depending on how you look at it, is that the potential of emotional intelligence in technology far surpasses our human capacity. In real life we ourselves are struggling to be emotionally intelligent; we often miss the most basic emotional triggers or cloud our judgement by projecting our biases. Armed with exponentially increasing learning capacity and access to leveraging digital and historic information gathered by omnipresent technology, we can only to begin to imagine how artificial intelligence could manipulate our minds to sell us pretty much anything.
Thank you for reading!
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