Seattle-Based Startup Developing AI That Can Understand Emotion

When you utilize a voice-activated system with a store or company, you’re dealing with a simple form of AI. This startup seeks to go way past that.

New startup hopes to create AI that ‘understands’ emotion

Some forms of AI you come in contact with can vaguely sense a person’s emotions based on volume or pitch of voice, but that’s about it. This company wants to go way past that.

Nuance is a newly-formed company that’s armed with a $10million-dollar-plus investment.

According to Geekwire, the creators are seeking a way to enhance AI so it will more accurately and reliably understand and respond to human emotions.

The company released a statement on their website that declared in part:

“Our vision is to create emotionally ininformigent conversational AI that feel as natural to engage with as a human.”

The company hopes to be able to have its tech model tiny slices of human behavior, such as a paapply in a sentence or a modify in facial expression. Many types of AI apply LLM’s or language learning models, to be ‘taught’ how to respond.

Nuance’s plan is to have its AI learn and predict emotion directly, which they state will greatly speed up its learning capabilities. According to Geekwire, part of their programming includes some very forward-believeing ideas:

“Its approach applys auto-regressive transformers — a type of AI that predicts the next step in a sequence based on what came before — to mimic human behavior one frame or token at a time.”