New Emotion AI introduces Sentimentality and Confusion measurements for deeper insight into how viewers feel about content enabling brands to build more meaningful connections with customers.

Affectiva, a Smart Eye company, today announced the latest version release of its category-defining Emotion AI product. This update to its media analytics offering makes several new features available to its market research customers.

Affectiva’s Emotion AI technology is used by 70 percent of the world’s largest advertisers and 28 percent of Fortune Global 500 companies to understand consumers’ and customers’ emotional reactions to content and experiences, maximizing brand ROI. With the help of Emotion AI, clients can test the unbiased and unfiltered emotional responses that consumers have with brand content such as video ad content and longer TV programming. The device-agnostic system works across mobile, tablet, desktop and physical environments, and works with optical sensors, standard webcams, near infrared and RGB cameras.

Affectiva has continuously invested in its media analytics and Emotion AI capabilities both leading up to and after being acquired by Smart Eye in June 2021. The update makes several notable improvements to its existing Emotion AI offering:

• Affectiva’s previously best in class face tracker has furthered its accuracy even more to understand the precise placement of faces on-screen, regardless of lighting conditions and head angles. Drawing on work done for automotive safety in very challenging camera and lighting conditions, this update greatly increases the usable video rate, increasing analytical robustness and cutting costs for clients.
• More substantive, enhanced facial emotion metrics that pick up on consumer and audience emotional states more accurately (such as anger and fear). This allows for a more meaningful and precise measurement of unfiltered and unbiased emotional and cognitive responses to content, all captured with opt in and consent.
• The introduction of sentimentality and confusion metrics. Measuring these two states has been largely difficult up to this point, as very little literature exists regarding the facial signals of these two mental states and underlying facial expression science. With understanding these two states a common request among clients, Affectiva had to break new ground in identifying relevant expressions that map to sentimentality and confusion. As a result, no other facial expression analysis system identifies these two mental states. These capabilities will be particularly relevant for Affectiva entertainment research clients.

The new emotion AI generates more unique insights that can then be practically applied to improve brand experiences and communications. This builds more positive and meaningful connections with customers, and enables optimization and action. It also directly impacts the bottom line as clients can now generate more usable data from the same sample number of responses; for example, the face tracker improvements can be directly applied to the increasing use of mobile phones in data capture, where data quality has historically struggled due to low lighting conditions and challenging head angle positions.

This SDK update also draws upon a massively diverse data set for algorithm training. Today, Affectiva has the largest emotional database in the world, with over 11.5 million consumer responses to more than 60,000 ads in 90 countries. It also reflects the most global representation of diversity in a media analytics data set, mitigating algorithmic bias and increasing cross-cultural sensitivity.

“I am especially proud of how Affectiva has been able to draw upon the diversity of our training set,” said Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, former Co-Founder and CEO of Affectiva, now Deputy CEO of Smart Eye. “For example, the majority of our data set is not Caucasian today, which allows us to minimize bias more effectively. This aligns with our very intentional mission to mitigate algorithmic bias, and to further the cause of prioritizing ethics in AI.”

“We are thrilled to announce these new capabilities for our existing and new customers,” said Graham Page, Global Managing Director, Media Analytics at Affectiva. “It represents our continued commitment to the media analytics industry through the iterative improvement of our technology, not to mention demonstrates the groundbreaking work our team has achieved in helping our customers further understand complex and nuanced emotions and cognitive states with technology.”

“It’s exciting to see these new developments come into play. Already we can see the benefit of the higher usability rate in studies, and how this will improve the quality and robustness of insights for our clients. The new emotion measures will also give our clients an even more nuanced understanding of how consumers are responding to their advertising content–allowing them to optimize their ads to be as effective as possible,” added Vera Sidlova, Global Brand Manager, Creative at Kantar.

The Emotion AI update will be made available to customers this November in both the Affectiva SDK and the core media analytics product.

For more information on Affectiva’s media analytics offering, visit: https://go.affectiva.com/affdex-for-market-research

About Smart Eye and Affectiva

Smart Eye is the global leader in Human Insight AI, technology that understands, supports and predicts human behavior in complex environments. Bridging the gap between humans and machines for a safe and sustainable future.

Our subsidiary Affectiva is pioneering Emotion AI, helping companies gain a deeper understanding of how consumers engage with their content, products and services, in automotive, media analytics and market research, and beyond. Our solutions are used by 28% of the Fortune Global 500 and 70% of the world’s largest advertisers.

Today, our technology is also embedded in next-generation vehicles, leading the way towards human-centric mobility through Driver Monitoring Systems and Interior Sensing solutions. Our Research Instruments offer unparalleled insights into automotive, aviation, assistive technology, behavioral science and many more fields. Our subsidiary iMotions provides the world’s leading biosensor software platform, that in real-time synchronizes data streams from multiple sensors.

Smart Eye was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Sweden with offices in the US, UK, Germany, Denmark, Egypt, Japan, Singapore and China. A publicly traded company since 2016, our customers include NASA, Nissan, Boeing, Honeywell, Volvo, GM, BMW, Geely, Harvard University and over 1,300 research organizations around the world.

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