He Built an AI Model That Can Decode Your Emotions

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast How Do You Use ChatGPT? I go in depth with Alan Cowen, the cofounder and CEO of Hume, a research laboratory developing an empathetic AI model. We dive into the science of emotions and break down how Hume’s AI functions. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. 

The future of AI technology isn’t just faster or more powerful—it’s empathetic. My guest for this episode, Alan Cowen, is leading the charge with the first-ever emotionally intelligent AI.

Alan is the cofounder and CEO of Hume, an AI research laboratory developing models trained to identify and measure expressions of emotion from voice inflections and facial expressions. The best part? Once it understands these emotions, the AI is designed to interact with users in a way that optimizes for human well-being and leaves them with a positive emotional experience.  

Previously, Alan—who has a Ph.D. in computational psychology—helped set up Google’s research into affective computing, a field focused on developing technologies that can understand and respond to human emotions. He operates at the intersection of AI and psychology, and I sat down with him to understand the inner workings of Hume’s models. Alan walks me through the shortcomings of traditional theories of emotional science and breaks down how Hume is addressing these challenges. While talking about the potential applications of the models, we also discuss the tricky ethical concerns that come with creating an AI that can interpret human emotions.

This is a must-watch for anyone interested in the science of emotion and the future of human-AI interactions. Here’s a taste:

• Decode what people really want. Alan believes that emotions are a way through which we can understand people’s hidden desires. “Your preference is whatever is going to make you happier or more awe-inspiring or amused…understanding people's emotional reactions is really key to learning how to satisfy people's preferences,” he says.
• Learn more from every customer service call. If emotions can reveal our hidden desires, the way we speak, coupled with the language we use, can reveal our emotions. “So [voice inflexions are] something that just accompanies every single word. In certain situations, it conveys twice as much information to consider the voice versus language alone,” Alan explains.
• Recognize our shared human experiences. People across cultures experience similar underlying emotions, even though they might use different words to describe it. “[L]et's say that in the U.S., it was more common to say ‘shock’ than ‘fear’ or ‘surprise,’ and in the U.K., people said ‘fear’ and ‘surprise’—we wouldn't say people in the U.S. and U.K. actually experience different emotions, it just turns out that they use different words as their basic vocabulary instinctively,” he says. 

I’m curious to know more about how Hume functions, but before we dive into that, we take a step back to understand how Alan thinks about the theories around emotions. We start by discussing the way science has traditionally divided up emotions into a discrete number of categories or dimensions.

• Paul Ekman's theory identifies six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise—that he proposes are universally experienced and recognized across all human cultures. According to Ekman, these emotions are hardwired into our biology and are expressed through universally consistent facial expressions.
• Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory suggests emotions are built from two dimensions: valence (how pleasant or unpleasant something is) and arousal (the level of energy or activation). Barrett argues that our brain interprets sensory inputs using these dimensions, and then constructs the specific emotions we feel based on the context and our past experiences.

Hume’s research is driven by the belief that both of these theories fail to map the full spectrum of emotional experiences because they are based on presumed categories or dimensions of emotion. For this reason, the Hume team has developed a new approach called the semantic space theory.