“It’s an emotional thermometer,” sums up Antony Perzo about Emobot, a device capable of analyzing human emotions, one of the latest fields of application conquered by artificial intelligence (AI) at CES, the Tech Show in Las Vegas.
Emobot, which looks like a speaker or a minimalist sculpture, does “continuous emotional monitoring” thanks to a camera and microphones, explains the young technological director of this French company. It is used to detect possible psychiatric disorders in older people, such as depression or anxiety.
Placed on a piece of furniture, the robot spends the day monitoring the person’s facial expressions, movements, and tone of voice to identify any significant changes in behavior and thus avoid emergency hospitalizations.
Antony Perzo and the other three Emobot co-founders hope to provide an answer to the risks associated with loneliness and medical desertification. His device, already tested in nursing homes and in private homes, should make it possible to adjust treatments and therapies without waiting for the next psychiatrist visit.
The algorithms are capable of “analyzing facial microexpressions” that reflect human emotions, a mirror of our “psychological and psychiatric state”, details the engineer.
In the field of healthcare, AI, capable of collecting and analyzing large volumes of data in real time, has long been used to perform many diagnoses, from cancer to urine tests. “As humans, we simply can’t process all the information we generate. We need help,” said Steve Koenig, vice president of research at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which organizes CES.
Body, Mind, AI
The expression “artificial intelligence” is questioned by many scientists, who see it above all as a marketing tool for companies. At CES, from toothbrushes to tractors, there are few devices and services that don’t have AI.
Nufa, for example, defines itself as “a pioneer in AI body transformation”: this mobile application offers users to retouch their photo to visualize themselves with a slim and athletic body, and motivate themselves to follow a 90-day plan to make it. result “in real life”. But AI “isn’t just a buzzword to win your CES bingo,” notes independent analyst Avi Greengart.
This technology “is used in smartphone cameras. In factories to identify defective products. In agriculture to identify weeds and spray them with herbicide. The AI is here, and there it is.”
Emil Jiménez founded MindBank Ai in a “quest for immortality”, “so that (his) daughter could always ask her dad a question.” Its app allows you to record your answers to personal questions (for example: “What does love mean to you?”) to “store your mind forever in the cloud.”
But beyond this ambition, the service won over its audience with the promise of getting to know itself better… in its lifetime. The application has a psycholinguistic model that analyzes the words of users to decode their emotions.
sentimental crowd
AI can also be used to understand the emotions of the crowd. The Ask Polly tool, from the Canadian company Advanced Symbolics, performs market research in minutes. The user asks you a question, for example, “Is it a good time to buy an apartment?” or “Should juvenile delinquents go to jail?” — and the program scans social networks (Twitter, TikTok, Reddit and Instagram) to analyze public opinion, finely and at scale.
In 2022, automated creation algorithms caused a stir, in particular those of the Californian company OpenAI with GPT-3 for text generation, and DALL-E for image generation. The French start-up Imki has designed a light and sound show for the Roman Theater in Orange where interactive graphics have been made thanks to programs of this type.
“This makes it possible to create content quickly with very low production costs. The art director has a very wide selection of images in a very short time,” emphasizes Marie Lathoud, Imki’s marketing director. She sees in AI a tool at the service of artists.
Saket Dandotia, Magnifi’s chief operating officer, acknowledges that generative AI poses a “threat to designers, whom it will replace” like robots in factories. His team created Strobe, an automated video creation software. “For us, AI is a great opportunity that will transform the entire creative industry,” he said.
Source: BFM TV
