Emotion-sensitive Human-computer Interfaces

People are polite to their computers. They are flattered by them, form teams with them and even interact emotionally with them. In their experiments, Reeves and Nass (The Media Equation, 1996) showed that humans impose their interpersonal behavioral patterns onto their computers. Thus, the design of humancomputer interfaces should reflect this observation in order to facilitate an effective communication. In order to build a human-computer interface that is sensitive to the user's expressed emotion, we investigated spectral, prosodic, and verbal cues in the user's utterance. Based on these cues, we showed that the classification system achieved accuracies comparable to human performance. Finally, we demonstrate how to integrate information about the expressed emotion into a dialog system. The dialog system employs different discourse strategies depending on the expressed emotion allowing for a natural and effective communication between the user and the system.