Emotion artificial intelligence next frontier for personal devices: Gartner

As artificial intelligence technology improves and matures, it will move on from an Apple Siri or a Google Assistant merely answering your questions to becoming your best friend and adviser.

As per research firm Gartner Inc, personal devices such as mobile phones will know more about an individual's emotional state than his or her own family by 2022.

According to statistics website Statista, the number of mobile phone users in India is expected to rise to 775.5 million in 2018. The number of smartphone users is expected to reach almost 443 million by 2022.

In a report last year, networking company Cisco said India will have 1,380 million mobile-connected devices in India by 2021, with 60 percent of these being "smart" mobile connections.

This means that Indians are looking at a huge number of "friendly" devices that will be able to detect human emotions and provide an option according to their moods. For instance, a smart fridge could tell how you feel and suggest foods that match your emotion.

"Emotion AI systems and affective computing are allowing everyday objects to detect, analyze, process and respond to people's emotional states and moods to provide better context and a more personalized experience," said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner. "To remain relevant, technology vendors must integrate AI into every aspect of their devices, or face marginalization."

The current wave of emotion AI systems is being driven by the increasing use of virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and other AI-based technology for conversational systems such as Siri and Google Assistant.

Companies such as Google and apple are increasingly focusing on the ability of these VPAs to understand natural human language, which is a tough task in a language rich country like India which has several languages and dialects.

However, as the technology matures, it will graduate into more areas such as educational software, video games, diagnostic software, athletic and health performance, and autonomous cars.

"Prototypes and commercial products already exist and adding emotional context by analyzing data points from facial expressions, voice intonation and behavioral patterns will significantly enhance the user experience," said Cozza.

"Beyond smartphones and connected home devices, wearables and connected vehicles will collect, analyze and process users' emotional data via computer vision, audio or sensors capturing behavioral data to adapt or respond to a user's wants and needs," she added.

Gartner also predicts that by 2021, 10 percent of wearable users will have changed lifestyles, and thereby extend their life spans by an average of six months.

It further expects that by 2020, 60 percent of personal technology device vendors will use third-party AI cloud services to enhance functionality and services.

Also, as password-based authentication becomes less and less effective for users, Gartner expects that through 2022, security technology combining machine learning, biometrics and user behaviour will reduce passwords to account for less than 10 percent of all digital authentications.