Application for Emotion-Sensing Software

In the blog entry below, I discuss how to go about writing software that senses emotion. After I wrote the blog article, a superb application came to -- customer service help lines.

These days, a lot of companies initially answer help lines with an automated answering system and a computerized kiosk helps the caller navigate to the right person.

If you had a software robot assessing the calls, and that software robot could tell if the caller was angry or frustrated, then the software would route that person immediately to a human. This kind of software could be valuable to companies who handle a large amount of customer calls per day.

Then the cynical side of me pipes up and says, maybe companies would rather have an irate customer dealt with by the computer. It saves emotional wear and tear on the customer service agent, and computers are much cheaper than humans.

Whatever way it goes, it won't be long before this emotional awareness is built into software.