LONDON: A team of European researchers have embarked on a landmark study that could potentially pave the path to 'emotional' machines which may interact with humans using voice.
"As our interactions with machines get more and more pervasive, it becomes harder and harder to ignore the emotional element. Taking it into account will become a routine part of computer science courses and computer development," says Professor Roddy Cowie, coordinator of the EU-funded Humaine project.
In effect, machines that feel may no longer be confined to science fiction.
Humaine has set up teams from disciplines as different as philosophy, psychology and computer animation to create the building blocks or tools needed to give machines so-called soft skills in order to make human-machine interface more user-friendly.
"We have developed systems for recognising emotion using multiple modalities and this puts us very much at the leading edge of recognition technology," says Cowie.
"The people who know about communications feed information to people whose job it is to get computers to generate sophisticated images," he adds.
Even as there are already concrete results, it is a highly complex project, which might take another two or three decades for full fruition, the Science Daily online said.
"People automatically assume the work is aimed towards full interaction between humans and machines, rather like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Cowie.
"That may never happen. Humaines philosophers have thought through carefully whether we should allow it to," he adds. Even if it does go that way, it is certainly not any time soon, he notes.