Huawei is developing a digital assistant that will be better at emotional interactions with the users. The assistant is based on the science fiction movie Her. The team hopes to develop a system that can cancel out the requirement of actually being in contact with the phone to use it.
The digital assistant will have more than just hardcoded responses and an emotionally intelligent assistant will read your mood and respond accordingly. The emotions will be determined by the tone of your voice, the use of your phone and other information for an increased emotional interaction.
It is still not clear how the assistant will rely on voice tones to interact with users and respond accordingly. Making an intelligent system alone is a challenge, let alone making an emotionally intelligent system.
Huawei does offer a voice assistant currently for the Chinese market. In a recent interview, Felix Zhang, Huawei’s Vice President of Software Engineering has revealed their ambitions, “We want to provide emotional interactions. We think that, in the future, all our end users wish they can interact with the system in the emotional mode. This is the direction we see in the long run.”
Zhang and the team are greatly impressed by the movie Her and they firmly believe that that the assistant portrayed in the movie can become a reality. According to Zhang, the near future will see all functions being accessed by voice commands and will eliminate the need for touching the device.
The idea is to evolve the current voice assistant so it provides emotional support as well in addition to all the functions of the voice assistant we know today. This will make the smartphone more than a gadget. We will find out in a few months time if Huawei succeeds in its ambitious mission.