By Rachel Kaser
Rachel Kaser is a writer and former game critic from Central Texas.
Unless youre watching Her, you dont generally connect AI with romantic angst. But researchers from the University of Southern California have trained one to give troubled relationships a death date which might be the key to saving them.
The researchers study, published in PLOS One, details the process. A machine learning algorithm listened in on the therapy sessions of 134 couples, and the researchers fed it information on the lifespan of each relationship. It studied how long both parties spoke, when, and what tone they used more than the actual words.
According to the paper:
Our experiments, using data from a longitudinal clinical study of couples in distressed relations, showed that predictions of relationship outcomes obtained directly from vocal acoustics are comparable or superior to those obtained using human-rated behavioral codes as prediction features.
While it might sound bleak to think an AI can hear you talk to your sweetheart and be able to determine youll break up in three months, theres another way of looking at its efforts namely, that hearing its predictions might give couples a way of realizing how toxic their tone is.
I dont claim to be an expert on relationships, but negative tone of voice can imply a lack of respect or regard an implication that can be poison for a relationship. So if youre in therapy and an AI attuned to the tone of voice gives your couplehood a death sentence, perhaps that can be a concrete way of correcting an otherwise ephemeral issue.
This article was previously published in The Next Web.
Photo by Everton Vila on Unsplash