When Bryan Cranston plays Walter White in the hit TV series Breaking Bad, viewers experience his voice transform from that of a weak chemistry teacher to that of a cold and calculating meth kingpin character known as Heisenberg, observes Yuval More, CEO of Beyond Verbal Communication Ltd.
“You instinctively know who to stay clear off,” according to More, who heads a company that commercializes technology that gleans the emotions and character traits of a person using their voice as they speak.
In a recent article in the technology Web site, Wired.com, he called this method of extracting, decoding and measuring human attitudes, feelings, emotional personality and decision-making profiles, Emotions Analytics.
He foresees “emotion analytics” embedded in mobile applications and devices “opening up a new dimension of human-machine interfaces. He sees a world where machines understand people, know how people feel, and know what people really mean.
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More provided five ways to emotionally power apps:
Totally redesign the app – Just like the introduction of the first touch screen in the mid-1960s, the growth of the Apple App Store and the embedding of gyroscopes into smart phones which revolutionized mobile gaming and led to the development of the Google Glass, emotional analytics is bound to be a game changer.
In the examples More provided, developers avoided a “quick fix” and instead worked hard to get the interface right. Building emotional analytics app will require similar rethinking of the entire app.
Don’t focus on words – Most research in the sentiment analysis industry is focused on word. However, words a poor emotional yardsticks, according to More.
More cites the work of communications pioneer Albert Mehrabian which suggests that only seven per cent of people’s communications involving feelings and attitudes is based on verbal language. The bulk of our emotions are communicated are communicated through other ways such as body language and vocal modulations.
Emotions live in intonation and body language – Vocal communications and language work together. It is through the combination of our vocal modulation, our body posture and the memory that the listener has that makes that makes the person we are talking to listen or shut us out.
Posture, gait and facial expression augment vocal communication to “broadcast what’s happening inside us,” said More. These factors can become better emotion yardsticks than language and text.