Apple’s Siri may one day respond to your facial expressions and emotions

Siri, Apple’s “personal digital assistant,” may someday respond to your facial expressions and emotions. The tech giant has filed for a patent (number 20190348037) for an “intelligent software agent” that would do just that.

In the patent filing, Apple notes that actions on intelligent software agents could be performed in response to a natural-language user input, such as a sentence spoken by the user. In some circumstances, an action taken by an intelligent software agent may not match the action that the user intended. 

For example, your face could be scanned by the screen of your iPhone, iPad, or (who knows?) Mac. Siri would  analyze the image and identify shapes or motions to determine whether particular muscles or muscle groups are activated. In other words, the personal digital assistant would “read” your expressions.

Apple is also looking into a method for Siri to understand your emotional state when addressing it (her?). It could do this by using previously stored information that defines semantic relationships between command inputs or portions of command inputs and actions. The words you speak would be analyzed by Siri to analyze the reaction information to see whether it’s positive or negative.

Of course, Apple files for — and is granted — lots of patents by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Many are for inventions that never see the light of day. However, you never can tell which ones will materialize in a real product.

Of course, Apple files for — and is granted — lots of patents by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Many are for inventions that never see the light of day. However, you never can tell which ones will materialize in a real product.