Facing Emotions
App translates emotions for visually impaired
Using artificial intelligence, Facing Emotions allows the visually impaired to "see" the emotion on the face of someone they are talking to by translating it into sound. The app, developed with the Polish Blind Association, uses the rear camera of Huawei's Mate 20 Pro phone to read the emotion on the face of whoever the blind user is talking to, by analysing their expression using artificial intelligence (AI). An offline machine-learning algorithm integrated into the phone identifies the main facial features of the interlocutor, including eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth. It can then determine the positions in relation to each other and identify the particular emotion. The app translates these seven universal human emotions – anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise and contempt – into seven distinct sounds. The detected emotion is played through the phone's microphone.