ABSTRACT
Researchers around the world are working on systems to detect expressed user emotion at the human-computer interface, many with the intention of using this input to improve the quality of human-computer interaction. Assuming that users will provide appropriate cues to their emotional state that systems can recognise, the next question is how that information might be used in shaping the human-computer interaction. Most researchers working on automatic emotion detection hope that their work will eventually lead to improved human-computer interaction. R. W. Picard for instance, maintains that giving computers the ability to recognise, react to and express emotions will make them more effective at communicating with their human users. The user interacts with a computer system, but the “computer’s” recognition ability is provided by an experimenter. This approach has proved useful in the design of speech recognition technology and similarly has great potential for the study of future affective technology.
