Ever wanted your smartphone to ask you how are you feeling? Good for you, because that is what Huawei is working on. World’s 3rd largest smartphone manufacturer and creator of an already successful China-based AI assistant is supposedly working on an assistant that will understand the context of and emotions behind the received commands thanks to facial, voice and behaviour recognition tools. According to Annette Zimmerman, research vice president of Gartner, ”By 2022, your personal device will know more about your emotional state than your own family.” Gartner believes that both healthcare and automobile industry could greatly improve with the emotion recognition tech. Belief in emotion-reading AI is shared by Huawei itself:

”We think that, in the future, all our end users wish [that] they can interact with the system in the emotional mode”, said Felix Zhang, vice president of software engineering in Huawei, ”this is the direction we see in the long run.”

Looks like our smartphones will soon be asking us if we are sad and offering imaginary hugs. Maybe they will not ”accidentally” electric shock us during the hug.