Personal devices soon to read user’s emotions

As artificial intelligence (AI) technology development continues and matures, personal devices such as mobile phones will read an individual’s emotional state by 2022.

Gartner, a global IT marketing research company, released Friday a new research report titled Predicts 2018: Personal Devices. “Emotion AI systems detect, analyze, process, and respond to people’s emotional states and moods to provide better context and more personalized experience. Adding emotional context by analyzing data points from facial expressions, voice intonation and behavior patterns will significantly enhance the user experience,” Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner.

Gartner predicts that by 2021, 10 percent of wearable users will have changed lifestyles, and thereby extend their lifespan by an average of six months. This will be enabled by the development of AI-powered specialist medical wearables diagnosing critical medical conditions or depression.

According to Gartner, wearable devices can have a beneficial influence on the amount of exercise users do and some devices allow users to discover physical conditions such as sleep apnoea or cardiac arrhythmia. With the development of security technology combining biometrics, by 2022, password-based authentication will account for less than 10 percent of all digital authentications.

A new report from Adobe, an American computer software company, estimates that the sales of voice assistants such as Amazon Echo and Google Home grew 103 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017 compared to the same period previous year. The survey reveals that over half of all consumers who own a voice assistant talk to it daily, at least once a day and 22 percent of consumers say that they shop using voice commands.

Sung-Gyu Kim sunggyu@donga.com