While computers outperform humans in most mathematical tasks and can do complex calculations that people never could, there's one area where machines haven't quite achieved humanlike smarts: emotional intelligence. But now, a new computer program can recognize people's emotions based on how they type, paving the way for computers that could one day be smarter than humans — a concept called "the singularity."
In a new study, researchers asked a small group of people to type a block of sample text, and then analyzed the keystrokes and characteristics to see if they could identify any of seven different emotional states: joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, shame or guilt.
The emotions that the program recognized with the greatest degree of accuracy were joy (87 percent of the time) and anger (81 percent of the time).
The researchers noted that emotion-detecting systems could be used in applications like online teaching: An emotionally intelligent online system could change its look, teaching style or the contents of its lectures to better adapt to a particular student's emotional state.
The system could be a valuable tool for online counseling sessions, Jeon said. For example, in some cultures where online counseling is particularly popular, psychiatrists may be able to estimate a patient's internal state even without the person verbally articulating it them.
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Source material from Fox News