Startup Brings Artificial Emotional Intelligence to the Web

Text. Video. Pictures. Audio. We’re used to searching the web for different kinds of content. Now, one startup is striving to add very different kind of search category: emotion. The first public pilot UK-based Emotions.Tech’s artificial emotional intelligence, launched in May, allows users to search according to how they want the results to make them feel. Emotions.Tech CTO Paul Tero says the ability to analyse digital content according to the emotion it provokes can redefine our relationship with technology. Imagine online advertisers able to position their adverts on emotionally appropriate pages. Or a virtual assistant who can read your moods. Understanding emotions, however, takes a lot of processing power. “We need that acceleration to keep up with the complexities of human emotion,” Tero says. To do that, Emotions.Tech turned to GPU-powered deep learning to rank, list and search web pages according to their emotional content.