The Greek startup that innovates in artificial intelligence
In our times, the biggest challenge on the road to the development of Emotional AI is associated with applications that will allow machines to understand human emotions and decide accordingly.
Behavioral Signals, a company that was founded by two people from the academic field in 2016, Alexandros Potamianos –Associate Professor of the National Technical University of Athens who has been living in the United States for the past few years– and Shri Narayanan, is developing applications that convert the “signals” of human feelings and behaviors to useful information and aims to fill this “gap” with the algorithm it developed.
The technical department of developers is located in Greece, while the commercial department is in Los Angeles. The company has a presence in both the USA and Athens, and in 2017 it received funding of $ 2,500,000 from the US fund Kairos.
The company is made up of a group of 24 people, divided into two “bases” in Athens and Los Angeles, and already has commercial tools that transform the “signals” from human emotions and behaviors, such as during a conversation with a call center, useful information. In this way, it opens the way for better communication between people and machines, with Behavioral Signals’ management thinking that it is in front of many competitors in the race to develop artificial intelligence in the field of emotions and behaviors.
Behavioral Signals has on its technology platform applications that start from call centers where, for example, depending on the tone of the customer’s voice, the response from the telephone support or sales center, as well as integration capabilities in a variety of applications, well-known “digital assistants” deploying companies such as Google, Apple and Amazon to the robots who in the future will be operating in areas that it now feels impossible, precisely because they can not perceive emotions and behaviors opou such as assistance to elderly or sick people and other people in need of support.
The company’s domain will allow devices, whether they are a robot, a smartphone or a “smart speaker”, to provide better communication with the user through the understanding of emotions as reflected in the tone of the user’s voice. It also allows organizations to make quicker and more effective decisions exactly in the same way, meaning “weighing” the tone of a customer’s voice, for example during a telephone sale or support.
“Man now tends to behave in the machine as if he were human”. This view, belonging to Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford University, is recalled in an interview with the newspaper “Kathimerini” about the gradual arrival of emotionally intelligent machines, by Mr. Alexandros Potamianos.
Mr. Alexandros Potamianos and Mr. Shri Narayanan, co-founders of Behavioral Signals
Artificial Intelligence, in our times, is not limited to creating machines such as Amazon’s Alexa Digital Personal Assistants – who can open a dialogue with the user and to “invade” the home and everyday life. Nor is it just limited to a virtual news presenter – like the one that appeared last year in China at the World Internet Conference – who has the ability to speak news by adopting human characteristics. Today, there are researchers trying to infuse machines and so-called “empathy” giving them “personality”. One of them is Mr. Potamianos.
Together with Behavioral Signals,
