Emotional Speech Recognition
Humans are really good at understanding the emotion behind spoken words. Does someone sound happy, or angry? Can we build an AI to do this and if so why would we want to when we're already so good at it?
We're good at understanding emotion because it's vital to our communication. We react and respond differently to people depending on their emotional state, be it happy, sad, angry or another emotion.
Having an AI complete this task can provide great advantage in so many different ways, many of which wouldn't be possible by us; from having digital assistance tools (think Siri and Alexa) understand the emotional intent of a request, to a business analysing their calls to identify potential complaints or the general mood of their customers. You could also apply this in a call center telephony routing, where the system picks up angry or upset customers and transfers them to a human to prevent further agitation.
This is also where AI can really help because we can process audio in bulk or without human intervention. Rather than having a person listen to a sample of calls, an AI can listen to a large volume without an invasion of privacy, whilst outputting the general positive or negative nature of their customers.