The days of missing urgent voicemail messages may soon be gone for good. Researches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing new software called Emotive Alert, which measures the speech patterns of a caller to determine their emotional state. The programme works by measuring the volume, pitch and speech rate in the first 10 seconds of a message and then sending a text message with an emoticon to let you know weather the message is happy, sad, urgent or formal. The idea is to use the system in phone exchanges and ‘smart answer phone’.

Stephen Furner, a researcher in human-computer interaction for BT says; “At the moment, communicating with machines is like an autistic experience. In the future, machines will know more about our emotions and respond in accordance with them.” In that vain, an Edinburgh-based company, Affective Media, will soon be selling software for cars that detect drowsiness and frustration in a driver’s voice when they ask the in-car navigation system for directions, and try to wake the driver up or calm them down. On the other hand, your car telling you to ‘chill out’ may prove not to be very soothing.

In practise, the Emotive Alert system could well run into some other problems. Tailored spam calls could artificially be altered to bump them to the top of your priority list or misinterpreted emotions could mean you miss important calls. The software would obviously be extremely useful in an emergency services call centre to prioritise calls. However, it may find difficulty when dealing with callers with autism, those who have trouble expressing emotions, or from that rare breed of person able to remain calm in any crisis. Sometimes there really is no replacement for human interaction.