Huawei is building a voice assistant that can read human emotions

Chinese company’s new AI inspired by 2013 film Her

Huawei’s Mate 10 Pro has its own Chinese-speaking voice assistant XiaoE for its domestic market. (Picture: Bloomberg)

Plenty of AI voice assistants have human names and friendly voices. But they aren’t human, and nowhere is that more obvious than their lack of understanding tone: Sarcasm is completely lost on assistants because they can’t pick up contextual clues like a human can.

Huawei says they want to change all that by creating a voice assistant that responds to a human’s emotional state -- citing Scarlett Johansson’s AI Samantha from the film Her as an inspiration.

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