A Tamil teen claims to have designed Raffi, a robot with emotions: Why it matters

Folks, meet Raffi, a robot with emotions, or so its developer Prateek vaunts. The latter is a 13-year-old student from Tamil Nadu who has apparently created this emotional robo. Prateek says, “'Raffi', my robot, can answer queries. If you scold him, he won't answer your queries until you're sorry. It can even understand you if you're sad.”

Tamil Nadu | A 13-year-old student, Prateek, has claimed to have designed a robot with emotions, in Chennai 'Raffi', my robot, can answer queries. If you scold him, he won't answer your queries until you're sorry. It can even understand you if you're sad: Prateek (24.08) pic.twitter.com/9YbqGMBXUw

— ANI (@ANI) August 24, 2022

However, we haven’t come across any explanations for how Raffi works or how Prateek designed this robot with emotions.

So, if Raffi is indeed an emotional being, let’s understand how this tech could work and what are its uses and concerns with that usage.

Emotion AI: What is it and how does it work?

Emotion AI/ Emotional AI/ Affective computing is the branch of AI and machine learning that works towards interpreting and responding to human emotions. Think of AI as an infant without a sense of the world let alone emotions. When you feed it with massive data sets involving examples of human emotions, reactions, and temperament, in time it is designed to learn patterns and compounding.

So, upon processing things like text, voice tone, facial expressions, and gestures, it tries to replicate human emotions (at least theoretically).

For processing, AI uses related technologies like computer vision (for analyzing video and images), speech science (for audio), and deep learning algorithms, among other techniques. 

Now, all those technical jargons aside, the crux of the matter is that it is being heavily researched and even being applied in areas like customer care, hospitality, etc. The global emotional AI market is anticipated to hit $173.81 billion and a CAGR of 34.05% by 2025.

On the flip side, the concerns are things like bias (of AI) and privacy based on the data it has been fed. Now, although it is not clear how and whether Raffi addresses these things, we will try to learn all those things in time. Let’s see.

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