Government using emotion-detecting AI

The UK government is trying to gain an understanding of how people feel on certain topics on social media by using artificial intelligence (AI).   The government is using the ‘Artificial emotional intelligence’ service by web science firm FlyingBinary, in partnership with emotional AI recognition company Emrays B.V. It has been released to the government’s G-Cloud marketplace.   “The web has become a noisy space as online content grows exponentially,” said Professor Jacqui Taylor, CEO of FlyingBinary. “Where once tools were in the hands of a social team it is increasingly difficult for humans using social media monitoring to understand the signals about a brand, initiatives, good news or issues.”   “This service uses AI technology to understand digital content from an emotional perspective and how resonant this is with an online audience before content is shared online.”   Emrays’s emotion AI is said to be able to detect more than 20 distinct emotions in any digital content, which it says can help companies and governmental organisations measure and understand how people feel about any topic, ranging from companies, brands and concepts.   The engine learns collective patterns of emotional reactions to digital content publicly available on the web. The emotion AI analyses and ‘feels’ content on par with humans, based on more than one billion data points it has already been trained on. It uses a diverse set of human emotions, such as love, anger, surprise and shock. The AI engine uses no personal data.   G-Cloud 10, which is predicted by the government to have a potential worth of £600 million, gives the central government, local councils, NHS Trusts and other public sector bodies a way to purchase cloud-based services, such as web hosting from a single, central website.