When Your Internet Things Know How You Feel

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For now though, our technology doesn’t really get us on an emotional level. We talk about empathy, but our technology is emotionally stunted.

Oswaldo Sepulveda and Ann Feathrestone

Sooner rather than later our machines will know more about our emotional state though.

The idea is this new emotional intelligence will help us communicate on an emotional level to others.

Your skin temperature.

I’m not so sure we’ve really thought this through.

So far, our approach to emotion has been to help people love our product.

De-escalating
A lot of delight seems to attempt to lighten the mood when you encounter an error. When you search for an emoji in Slack that doesn’t exist, you get the cry emoji instead. 404 messages are often the place for humor too. Whether it actually lightens the mood is another question, of course.
Discovery
You might be tempted to call this category pointless fun, but Snap has proven that discovering secret features motivates people to share what they figured out and feel just a bit clever about it. When MakerBot’s website that “prints” the hamburger icon when you close the menu or when Alexa answers “What’s your favorite color?” with “Infrared is super pretty” are other examples of “Easter eggs”.
Care
Some delightful details seem to have your back. These range from security, like when Chrome detects you are on an insecure connection, it won’t autofill credit card details, to preventing embarrassment, like when you are sending multiple messages to hosts on Airbnb and the last message is automatically copied with the name of the host automatically replaced, to work saving, like Gilt’s site auto completing your email based on common domains or Codeacademy offering to summarize a thread, to error prevention, like Spotify’s warning if you add a song to a playlist that you’ve already added.
Personalization
When Coursera recommends online courses related to a particular job or when Tumblr shows pictures similar to one you liked to the right side of the screen, these are thoughtful and personal touches.
Sensory-rich
The web and app-based experience is often sensory-poor, so delightful details can visually enrich the experience in addition to preventing mistakes. The clock icon on Mailchimp, for instance, changes based on when you have scheduled your campaign. TV listings on NBC’s Apple TV app move from daylight to night.

Delight tries hard to create happiness, maybe a little too hard sometimes. It can be kind of like that person telling you to cheer up and just smile, when you’re feeling down. Well-intentioned, perhaps, but potentially annoying. Creating a design element, a naming scheme, or an interaction pattern that’s surprising and clever can get in the way too. The following common problems can work against the intent of a design.
Obstructionist
Whether unclear naming or distracting animation, too-clever details actually make it more difficult to actually engage with the product in a meaningful way.
Paternalistic
While we want products to show that they have our back, it’s all too easy to cross the line toward a “we know best” kind of tone. Product Hunt suggesting that you go to bed if you’ve been browsing for too long is an example of crossing this line.
Infantalizing
Sometimes a little childish humor is OK, but we don’t want to be treated like children. Compare Waze, which is meant to be for grownups, with Pokemon Go, a game for kids (and everyone else), and the former looks more childish than the latter
Trivializing
Once in a while, delightful details trivialize something that isn’t trivial at all. In one research project on retirement saving, one participant was taken aback by the cheerfully illustration telling him that he had enough saved for 42 days of retirement. He said flatly, “I don’t think this is exactly a YAY moment for me.”

It looks a certain way

Designers often talk about humanizing technology, but it’s not always clear what that means. My hope is making technology that amplifies our humanity. What it typically translates to is something a little different—giving technology human qualities.

Emotional design, as its practiced currently, starts with moments of delight. As these details start to come together, emotional design can evolve into a coherent personality. Tone of voice, visual cues, and micro-interactions come together as a relatable character. Most of the time, this manifests as a brand mascot.
Human spokespeople can make products relatable, but they are more complicated. They have opinions, they age, they do other things besides represent a brand. Occasionally, they say or do things that are inappropriate or embarrassing or even illegal. I’m sure we can all think of a few examples without naming names.
Mascots, or “spokescreatures”, work together with other aspects of the product or brand by conveying the benefit and connecting with the target audience in a way that human spokespeople may not. The Pillsbury doughboy, the GEICO gecko, and Mailchimp’s Freddie are all examples of successful brand mascots. So oddly, we often humanize technology with animals or other creatures rather than humans.

Given how easy it is for us to anthropomorphize animals or even inanimate objects, investing the right technologies with our own emotions and those we want mirrored back at us is almost inevitable.

Have you ever had a crush on a character in a movie or television show? I'll bet you have. And what kind of information did you have about that character? It was embodied in an unusually attractive body, and if it was a long-running show, over time you heard it speak perhaps a few hundred lines of dialogue.

Vincent Desailly for SoftBank
Aldebaran's NAO robots.The company describes its "companion" robot this way:"NAO is a 58-cm tall humanoid robot. He is small, cute and round. You can't help but love him! NAO is intended to be a friendly companion around the house. He moves, recognises you, hears you and even talks to you!"
In the mid-1960s, a computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a program called ELIZA, which was meant to simulate a kind of psychotherapist that essentially repeats back everything the patient says. (The patient says, "I'm feeling depressed," and the therapist responds, "You're feeling depressed? Tell me more.") To his surprise, despite the simplicity of the program, people who interacted with it ended up telling it all kinds of secrets and couldn't tear themselves away; they were so eager to be listened to that they were happy to open their hearts to a computer.
The more modern versions of ELIZA (whom you can talk to here if you like) are chatbots, one of whom recently passed the Turing test, which was based on a conjecture by the mathematician Alan Turing. Turing proposed that when a computer could convince humans with whom it was interacting that it was actually a person, it could be said to be engaging in a form of thinking. Last month, a chatbot successfully fooled a third of human testers into believing it was a person.
But the Turing test isn't a test of artificial intelligence as much as it is a test of human gullibility. The recent successful test didn't show how clever the chatbot was, because it really wasn't all that clever. (The cleverest thing about it was the programmers' decision to make it a 13-year-old Ukrainian named Eugene Goostman, whose youth and foreignness would lead the humans on the other side to forgive its misunderstandings and non sequiturs.) If even a bot as simple as Eugene Goostman can fool lots of people into thinking it's human, we're rather easily fooled. But the question isn't what happens when we're trying to figure out who's a computer and who's a human—a problem we aren't likely to face very often—but what happens when we don't really care.
The film showed something far more disturbing than the more crowd-pleasing version of a future in which artificial intelligences try to kill us all.
The Spike Jonze film Her, which was released last year and is now available on DVD, portrayed a near future in which a man falls in love with an artificial intelligence, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The film showed something far more disturbing than the more crowd-pleasing version of a future in which artificial intelligences try to kill us all. While the kind of emotional growth the AI (named Samantha) goes through in Her (not to mention its perfect simulation of a human) isn't possible yet, it does remind us how easy we are to manipulate. The AI becomes romantically irresistible to the lead character, Theodore, not only because he's lonely but because if you learn enough about what people find appealing, it's far from impossible to simulate it. In one key scene, Theodore challenges Samantha on why she sighs. "I guess I was just trying to communicate because that's how people talk. That's how people communicate," she says. "Because they're people," he replies. "They need oxygen. You're not a person." But he falls in love with her anyway.
Her presents its AI as something new in a world not too different from our own. But when something like Samantha comes along, it won't be sudden, it will be a stage in a gradual evolution in which our relationship to our technology becomes more and more personal.
When Apple debuted Siri a couple of years ago, people heralded it as a new era, but it never fulfilled its promise. (I don't know anyone who uses Siri, or the Google version, in anything like the way portrayed in Apple's ads.) But that wasn't because people didn't want to talk to their phones, it was because Siri is, well, an idiot. It doesn't know very much, it's constantly making mistakes, and the voice has just enough mechanical rhythms to never let you forget you're talking to a piece of software, and a very limited one at that.
But if you think that you could never have an emotional attachment to software, it's probably only because you haven't met the right software yet, not because your emotional intelligence is so subtle and refined you can only connect with real humans in all their complexity. There are men in Japan who fall in love with pillows. Pillows! As crazy as that is, our capacity to create emotional bonds doesn't begin and end with homo sapiens. If you can feel deeply about a dog you consider a part of your family despite the dog's limited range of emotions and ability to communicate with you, why not a piece of software?
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Researchers at MIT recently debuted a prototype home personal assistant called Jibo, which is meant to answer questions and perform tasks like ordering takeout or coordinating the systems of your smart home (whenever your home gets upgraded to become smart). But unlike a tablet, Jibo has a physical presence that is meant to evoke at least a rudimentary version of personality; among other things, it uses facial recognition to determine to whom it's talking, and leans toward you as if it's listening. This is an early version of something likely to become quite common—robots or software that integrate features of human personality, whether it's voice or movement or something else, as they perform progressively more complex tasks for us. As Louise Aronson explained in this Sunday's New York Times, there is an enormous need for caregivers for the elderly, and technologists all over the world are working to create robots that can fill it (especially, and unsurprisingly, the Japanese).
Given how easy it is for us to anthropomorphize animals or even inanimate objects, investing the right technologies with our own emotions and those we want mirrored back at us is almost inevitable. And as software becomes faster and more capable, it will be a piece of cake for artificial intelligences to make us fall in love with them if that's what they're programmed to do (or what they want to do).
Imagine that every new thing you learned about them was charming and lovely.
If you think that's impossible, you're probably giving yourself too much credit. Think back on your romantic life for a moment. At some point in your past you probably fell for someone who turned out to be nothing like what you thought they were. In retrospect, you realized you didn't really know the person all that well, but you were temporarily beguiled by something—physical attractiveness, some shared interest, or maybe a quirk of circumstance. It wasn't that hard to pique your interest with some superficial things, or even to sustain it for a while. You had a powerful emotional response to that person, based on very limited information. Now imagine that the thing that eventually turned you off, whether it was the shabby way they treated that waiter or their weird political views or the way they left their laundry around the apartment, never existed. Imagine that every new thing you learned about them was charming and lovely.
Have you ever had a crush on a character in a movie or television show? I'll bet you have. And what kind of information did you have about that character? It was embodied in an unusually attractive body, and if it was a long-running show, over time you heard it speak perhaps a few hundred lines of dialogue. Now consider what a powerful piece of software could do if it analyzed thousands of books and movies and TV shows to determine what makes a character romantically compelling, breaking those characters down into hundreds of variables (with your help, as it determines your particular preferences) and then reassembling them into something made just for you.
As you're interacting with that software—building a relationship—it isn't that you'll be fooled into thinking it's a real human. It's that you won't care.

Fb quiz personality

Emotions were connected, often in unexpected ways.

To our credit, we have our ways – delight and persuasive

Self-report: PAD or Panas, Geneva Emotion Wheel
In depth interviews

GSR meters, heart rate monitors
Tobii, xLabs, iMotions
fMRI, EEG, EMG

Affectiva, Kairos, EmoVu
Beyond Verbal, Vokaturi
Posture, gesture, use of space

NPS, CES
Brand tracking: purchase intent, brand awareness, brand trust

Happiness is individual and collective
Happiness is about human connection
Happiness is in experiences, creativity cultivates happiness
Happiness is emotionally rich
Happiness has a body it’s multisensory, it’s in your brain and in your body

So the machines will know, or will they?

Happiness is individual and collective, build in generosity, shared purpose
Happiness is about human connection, intimacy, weak connections, all kinds
Happiness is in experiences, creativity cultivates happiness,
Happiness is emotionally rich
Happiness has a body it’s multisensory, it’s in your brain and in your body

When Your Internet Things Know How You Feel

Pamela Pavliscak