Emotion recognition and its application to computer agents with spontaneous interactive capabilities

Nonverbal information such as emotion plays an essential role in human communication. We first study the recognition of emotions involved in human speech. We propose an emotion recognition algorithm based on a neural network. An emotion recognition rate of approximately 50% was obtained in a speaker-independent mode for eight emotion states. We tried to apply this emotion recognition algorithm to a computer agent that plays a character role in the interactive movie system we are developing. We propose to use emotion recognition as key technology for an architecture of the computer characters with both narrative-based and spontaneous interaction capabilities.