Social and Emotion AI: The Potential for Industry Impact

The goal of this paper is to provide an account of the current progress of Social and Emotion AI, from their earliest pioneering stages to the maturity necessary to attract industrial interest. After defining the scope of these domains and showing that they overlap to a substantial extent with pre-existing computing areas (e.g., Social Signal Processing and Affective Computing), the article tries to measure the industrial interest they attract through several publicly available market forecasts. These show that the volume of the market in Social and Emotion AI is expected to grow considerably in the next years and, hence, the companies active in the field are likely to attract increasingly more attention and investment. Finally, the paper shows that the very appearance of products driven by Social and Emotion AI might be a likely reason for the extensive current debate on AI and ethics. Besides ensuring that the development of AI follows a path that ensures the greatest possible advantage for society, such a debate might actually define the next research avenues in the field.