A roadmap to emotionally intelligent creative virtual assistants

Abstract

Cognitive psychology has accumulated a vast amount of knowledge about human social emotions, emotional appraisals and their usage in decision making. Can an emotional cognitive architecture injected into an artifact make it more “humane”, and therefore, more productive in a variety of creative collaboration paradigms? Here, we argue that the answer is positive. A large number of research projects in the field of digital art that are currently underway could benefit from integration of an emotional architecture component into them. An example is the project Robodanza (a robotic dancer), the functioning of which is based on a hidden Markov model trained by a genetic algorithm, yet lacking deep emotional intelligence. Generalizing on this example, we outline a roadmap to building a variety of useful virtual creative assistants to humans based on an emotionally intelligent cognitive architecture.