Huawei’s digital assistant will be emotionally intelligent, may replace human interactions

Huawei is developing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant that will provide better emotional interactions with its users. The emotionally intelligent assistant is inspired by the science fiction movie Her. The team is envisioning to develop a system that cancels out the requirement of touching a smartphone to use it.

Rather than just feeding hardcoded responses, an emotionally intelligent assistant will able to read your mood and respond accordingly. It will determine your emotions by the tone of your voice, the use of your phone and other bits of information for an increased emotional interaction. Previously, Amazon’s digital assistant, Alexa was enabled to recognize multiple voices.

However, we are unsure how this assistant will rely on voice tones to interact with users and responding to their need accordingly. Making an intelligent system already poses a challenge for technology companies, therefore an emotionally intelligent system sounds like a tough one.

Currently, Huawei offers a voice assistant for its Chinese market. In a recent interview, Felix Zhang, Huawei’s Vice President of Software Engineering has revealed their ambitions,

“We want to provide emotional interactions. We think that, in the future, all our end users wish they can interact with the system in the emotional mode. This is the direction we see in the long run.”

Zhang and his executive team is greatly inspired by Her and believes that the voice assistant presented in the movie, is a dream for all engineers. Zhang predicts that in the near future, almost all functions will be accessible through a voice command, eliminating the need for touching devices to use them.

The idea is to evolve the digital assistant to maintain a conversation and provide emotional support to the user, meanwhile also informing them about news, traffic conditions, emails, etc. The smartphone will not only be a gadget then but also a friend. While the ambitions sound exciting, it is slightly creepy how the system may evolve to replace human interactions.