AI meets emotional intelligence

The app was designed to target two aspects of alexithymia’s symptoms: interpreting the way that other people express emotions and recognizing one’s own emotions.

IEmote takes a multifaceted approach to improving how its users understand and label the feelings other people are experiencing. The app displays pictures and prompts users to select what emotion they believe the person in the photo is portraying. The developers have also created activities linked to stories, which have users identify the emotions that are being portrayed or are likely to be experienced at different points in the narrative.

The app also helps users to recognize their own emotions through a journal, which prompts users to write about events of their day, then uses artificial intelligence to label what emotions are likely being expressed in the writing. While exploring the app myself, I was incredibly impressed with how accurate it was; it correctly predicted the underlying feelings in every entry I wrote, including ones in which I tried to exclude any words that directly indicate a certain emotion.

IEmote has been in development for around eight months and has already gotten recognition at a national educational conference. The startup’s founders met through a psychology summer program run by Stanford University, during which they began the capstone project that would later evolve into iEmote. While the program was planned to occur on the Stanford campus, the pandemic pushed it to an online format.

The team that kick-started the app’s development consisted of nine people, and four of those students — Zhao, Sudhir, Soh and Hatti — continued working on it after the program. Although the four didn’t meet in person until they attended the South by Southwest EDU conference this month, Soh recalls that Zoom made it possible for them to stay connected and continue working on the project over the past few months.

By harnessing modern technologies like artificial intelligence to solve the next generation’s educational struggles, iEmote is truly looking toward the next generation of education technology.

“Artificial intelligence plus social-emotional learning is the future,” Hatti said.

Sudhir explains that they aim to be almost a “Khan Academy for social-emotional learning” and envision a future in which “students spend 15 minutes in class getting in touch with their emotions and practicing these really important skills that are oftentimes overlooked when, in fact, they are super important.”

Zhao explained that they aim for the app to be adopted by educational institutions, whether those are schools, mental health care providers or enrichment programs. The team is working to promote awareness about the importance of social-emotional learning, even working on the possibility of launching a podcast that would feature some of the researchers they have worked with while developing the app or some of the app’s future users. As all four of them agreed, this is only the beginning of iEmote.

The iEmote team is currently working on adding iEmote to mobile app stores and has already launched their Beta web-app, which can be found on their website, iemoteapp.com, or their Instagram @iemoteapp.

Ellen Kim is a senior at San Mateo High School. Student News appears in the weekend edition. You can email Student News at news@smdailyjournal.com.