Robots are becoming more human. Sure, they’ve long been able to do backflips, win a game of Go, drive a car, serve burgers and handle our mundane questions (Hey, Alexa?), but they’ve always been big brains without heart — until now.
That’s right: Robots are learning to feel, or at least understand how you’re feeling. As AI becomes more prevalent in everyday life, that ability can go a long way toward helping them become more useful.
To that end, Realeyes has developed an AI trained to read emotions and help brands understand how people respond to their ads. The company, which is headquartered in London and has an office in New York, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $12.4 million to fuel those efforts.
The round will help the company fund future AI research and expand to Japan, said Mihkel Jäätma, Realeyes CEO and co-founder.
“It’s a great vote of confidence that we’re on the right track,” Jäätma said. “Our existing investors are happy to see how our expansion has played out. The U.S. is still the biggest market for us in terms of opportunity, but we also found a great opportunity to expand into the Japanese market.”
But how did Realeyes create an AI learn that can read our feelings? After all, most people aren’t even that good at it.
Founded in 2007, Realeyes built its AI from scratch, training it on more than 450 million frames of voluntary participants watching videos online from around the world, Jäätma said. Working with thousands of annotators from around the world to provide an accurate global perspective, they tagged a catalog of facial reactions as one of six universal human emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear and disgust.
If you look at how we make decisions, 90 percent of them are related to emotions, and marketers don’t have access to that data.”
From that foundation, Realeyes created an AI system that can interpret how a person feels.
“We saw an opportunity in marketing first because every marketer knows emotions are critical in driving good outcomes,” Jäätma said.
Through Realeyes, marketing firms and brands are able to show their ads to a voluntary focus group that is recorded using webcams. The system is then able to provide a real-time report on how engaged a person is and how they felt watching the ad.
Brands can then use that information to craft or hone their message.
“It’s fundamental,” Jäätma said. “If you look at how we make decisions, 90 percent of them are related to emotions, and marketers don’t have access to that data.”
With this new round, Realeyes will expand into Japan, the third-largest economy in the world. It also plans to develop its technology beyond the marketing sector and into areas like smart cities, mental well-being and robotics. However, Jäätma wasn’t prepared to confirm additional details.
The round was led by current investors Draper Espirit and NTT DOCOMO Ventures, with participation by Global Brain, Karma Ventures and The Entrepreneurs Fund.
