Sure, the bots are getting pretty smart, but are they emotionally intelligent?

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

It's getting easier and easier to talk to machines from digital voice assistance like

Siri and Alexa to the latest generation of AI chatbots.

Natural language processing technology has made it possible to engage in pretty human-like

conversations with forms of artificial intelligence.

But can a bot ever really get us?

That's what Aniket Barra is working on.

He's an associate professor of computer science at Purdue University who's trying to teach

emotional intelligence to artificial intelligence, because he says language is a lot more than

just words.

There is an inherent emotion when we are growing up, we're looking at our parents, our

looking our friends and family.

So these kind of human level learnings, we are trying to replicate some of that from

an AI perspective.

So we are trying to train these AI models on human data.

If this is happiness, this is sadness, learn on these things, these are certain aspects.

So we are trying to teach them, let's say, how a parent would teach their child.

What are some of the real world applications of emotionally intelligent AI?

So one of the projects we worked on is when COVID started, there was a big rise in mental

health cases throughout the country.

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