Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D., is a pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence (emotion AI), as well as the co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, the acclaimed AI startup. Also an acclaimed TED Talk and Aspen Ideas speaker, Rana was named one of America’s Top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes and included in Fortune‘s 40 Under 40 list. Today she joins the show to break down the science behind our emotions, facial recognition, and emotional responses.
Listen in as she shares insights from her new book, Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology, including how reliable facial expressions truly are for detecting feelings and how much individual or cultural variation there is when it comes to emotion. You’ll learn why emotional intelligence is so important, how emotion AI is improving teleconferencing, and more.
Learn the science behind our emotions and why emotional intelligence is so important with @kaliouby, author of GIRL DECODED. Share on X
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On Today’s Episode We’ll Learn:
- Why emotional intelligence is so important.
- How reliable facial expressions are for reading emotion.
- Why Rana believes there is more to communication than the basic six emotions.
- How much individual variation there is in emotion.
- What emotion AI is.
- How emotion AI is improving teleconferencing.
Key Resources for Rana el Kaliouby:
- Connect with Rana el Kaliouby: Website | LinkedIn | Twitter
- Amazon: Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology
- Kindle: Girl Decoded
- Audible: Girl Decoded
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Full Episode Transcript:
- Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world class experts. Every episode shows you how to improve your business with advice based on science or data.Roger’s new book, Friction, is published by McGraw Hill and is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Dr Robert Cialdini described the book as, “Blinding insight,” and Nobel winner Dr. Richard Claimer said, “Reading Friction will arm any manager with a mental can of WD40.”To learn more, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction, or just visit the book seller of your choice.Now, here’s Roger.Roger Dooley: Welcome to Brainfluence. I’m Roger Dooley. Our guest today will be familiar to many of my neuromarketing blog readers, but in preparing for this session, I learned that she’s accomplished amazing things beyond the narrow scope of consumer neuroscience.Roger Dooley: Rana el Kaliouby is a pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence or emotion AI, as well as the cofounder and CEO of Affectiva. You may know Affectiva from its early days when they were known primarily for analyzing ads using facial coding, but with software rather than human experts.Roger Dooley: Rana and grew up in Cairo, Egypt. After earning undergrad master’s degrees in computer science at the American University in Cairo, she attended Cambridge University and got her PhD there. Later she joined the MIT Media Lab as a research scientist, where she focused on emotion recognition technology in a variety of fields. Affictiva originated from Rana’s MIT projects, and now works with more than a quarter of the companies in the Fortune Global 500.Roger Dooley: Rana was named by Forbes to their list of America’s Top 50 Women in Tech, and Fortune included her in their list of 40 under 40. In 2018, in her spare time apparently, she was the cohost of a PBS Nova series on AI. And Rana’s new book is Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology.Roger Dooley: Welcome, Rana. It’s great to finally have you on the show.Rana el Kaliouby: Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to it.
Roger Dooley: Yeah, so congratulations on Girl Decoded. It’s not the typical business book we usually discuss on this show. It’s really more of a memoir that includes your view of history of what you call emotional AI. It’s really an amazing and inspiring story and I think it’s going to appeal to a huge audience. In fact, pretty soon, we will be approaching graduation time and I would encourage our listeners who may have a student that they’re going to buy a gift for, forget Dr. Seuss’s The Places You’ll Go. Instead, get that new grad a copy of Girl Decoded. I think that’ll probably be far more inspiring and useful. But enough of that. Rana, how do you define emotional AI?
Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, emotion AI. So if you think of human intelligence, IQ or your cognitive intelligence matters, but we know from years and years of literature that your emotional intelligence matters just as much, right? So people who have higher EQs tend to be more persuasive. They’re more likable. They actually lead more successful personal and professional lives. So we know that it’s not just your IQ that matters. EQ matters, too.
Rana el Kaliouby: And I believe that that’s true for technology as well, especially technology and devices that really interact with us on a day-to-day basis. And so that’s true, of course, for a lot of our devices. And so I believe that all these technologies need to have not only IQ, but they need to have emotional intelligence as well. They need to know human.
Roger Dooley: It’s been years, decades, probably 40 plus years since Paul Ekman created the science of facial coding and his facial action coding system, and his work has been applauded, used a lot but also criticized. Where do you stand on Ekman’s work today in 2020?
Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. Yeah. First I want to take a step back and kind of dissect how do humans communicate anyways, right? Again, there’s consistent literature that a vast majority of our communication is nonverbal and that kind of splits equally between your facial expressions and your gestures and your vocal intonations.
Rana el Kaliouby: I have always been fascinated especially with the face and Paul Ekman has inspired my work. In particular, Paul Ekman, as you would know, he developed the facial action coding system where he mapped every facial muscle movement and we have about 45 of these to a code. So when you smile, when you do a lip corner pull, it’s action unit 12. That’s the zygomaticus muscle. Action unit four is the corrugator muscle, which is when you draw your eyebrows together and look really angry or confused. So he kind of built that system and made it very objective to describe facial expressions. And so I think there’s little controversy on that body of work that he and his team developed and published.
Rana el Kaliouby: Where it becomes a little more controversial, he kind of really focused on these six basic emotions, happy, sad, anger, fear, disgust and surprise and later added contempt. I am a believer that that kind of is a very simplistic view of how we kind of articulate or how do we communicate with our face. I mean, we communicate a wide gamut of emotions and mental states and social states with our face, and I actually believe that it’s a more interesting problem to go beyond these basic six because yeah, they’re important, but they’re not the only things we communicate and they’re especially not the only things we communicate when we are in a classroom or when we’re engaging with our phones or devices. Yeah. So I’m a big fan of his work, have applied that in my research and now at the company. But we have gone beyond his theory of six basic emotions.
Roger Dooley: A fun little trivia fact for our listeners. Those six basic emotions turn into the five little brain characters in the Disney Pixar movie Inside Out. And he actually consulted on that film. Did you happen to see that, Rana?
Rana el Kaliouby: Oh, I love that movie.
Roger Dooley: Isn’t it great? I have talked to so many people who are really into the science of the brain, and obviously we don’t have little characters in our heads, but almost to an individual, they all love the movie because in its own way it was kind of an accurate portrayal of how things happen in our heads.
Rana el Kaliouby: Absolutely. Absolutely. It brought emotions to life, and it also underscored how emotions are so important in how we make decisions, how we build memory, right, how we connect with others, our health and wellbeing. It just brought it to life in a very relatable way. It was great.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. So how reliable of a tool are facial expressions? Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, it talks about how people are really bad at reading other people. We all rely on facial expressions and body language and other things, and not to mention what people are actually saying, but we’re not very good often at interpreting that.
Roger Dooley: And he cited some research that even expert police interrogators, people who had decades of experience interrogating suspects, had difficulty reading some people. There was one group of people who it was quite easy to read and you could pick up and say, “Yeah, that person’s clearly lying,” and they were right almost every time.
Roger Dooley: But there were other people where they did really no better than chance. Are there some people that are just inscrutable or is it that we just haven’t trained people right or that maybe AI is going to be more effective at reading these people? How effective is it across sort of the entire population?
Rana el Kaliouby: I love this question because it underscores how complex of a problem it is. Often when we are talking to partners or clients or whatever, they’ll say, “Oh, there’s like 10 different companies that do smile detection,” and I’m like, “But the problem isn’t about detecting a smile. It’s so much more complex, right?” You need to understand the context of the expression. There’s actually tens or maybe hundreds of different types of smiles. It depends on how it unfolds over time. It depends on the intensity of it. It depends on what else is happening on the face and in the voice and gestures when the smile kind of unfolds.
Rana el Kaliouby: So it is a very complex problem, and yeah, humans aren’t great at it. My first foray into this was working with individuals on the autism spectrum who find all of this particularly hard for a whole host of reasons. And so that’s kind of on the extreme end of the spectrum where these people really, really, really struggle with understanding non-verbals. But for a lot of us, it’s challenging. You need to be paying really full attention, which we are all ADD in today’s kind of world of technology and 24/7 online. It’s hard to do this right. So with our technology, the idea is to try and bring scale … that’s important … and just bring accuracy and repeatability to this process of quantifying facial expressions.
Roger Dooley: I recall one of my early Affectiva experiences. This was years ago. I’m not sure how many. I think it was when the company was still quite new, but you have an online tool that a viewer could watch a funny cartoon, short cartoon, just a minute long or something, and then see their responses to it, their emotional responses. And apparently I do not emote much when I’m sitting alone in front of the computer because I was just about a flat line on that thing.
Roger Dooley: And I found it kind of interesting that in your book you talk about how different people and even different cultures react. I don’t know how common it is for people to be just sort of unresponsive, but I know you also pointed out that in some Asian cultures, people tend to react very little if there’s other people around. But if they’re alone, unlike me, they will react more. And I found that kind of interesting, particularly since when you think of a comedy act, people won’t sit there and guffaw by themselves, but if the whole crowd is laughing, then they’ll get into it too. So I’m curious, how much individual variation is there?
Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. We have now analyzed over nine million facial responses from 90 countries around the world responding to about 45,000 ads, video ads. So we have a ton of data at this point, and I will tell you, as you would expect, some ads really take you on an amazing emotional journey and some ads really don’t, right? So we do see kind of a lot of the shampoo ads where you just watch it and it’s a flat curve. Nobody’s emoting. But we’ve also seen incredible videos, video advertising, that elicits a wide range of emotions, humor, sentimental ads, tear-jerking ads, ads that kind of draw anger and fear. And so that’s been really interesting to see kind of how content can draw a wide range of emotion. So that’s kind of one factor.
Rana el Kaliouby: The other factor is of course, as you alluded to, the cultural, the cross-cultural differences in how people express emotions. And we found, for example, that there are some societies and cultures that are way more expressive. I mean, I come from Egypt and we tend to be very emotive, very expressive with our hands and loud. But then you compare us to, I don’t know, East Asia and yeah, it’s a lot more dampened. So what we have now built are these geographic-based benchmarks, so we compare a person in Japan with another person in Japan, not with an Egyptian like me. Do you know what I mean?
Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rana el Kaliouby: So these benchmarks have been really powerful and allowing us to parse the meaning of the data. I mean, we’ve also observed … That was something I was just really curious about, the gender differences in how people express emotions. So we found that by and large, women tended to be more expressive, particularly showing more positive emotions like a smile, so their smiles tended to be … they tended to be more intense and lasted longer. But we found that that depended on where we were looking at the smile. So in the US, I believe women smiled 40% more than men. In France and Germany, it was only 25% more. And then in the UK, we found no statistically significant difference between men and women, which I just find fascinating.
Roger Dooley: Yeah, yeah. Maybe that stiff upper lip thing in Britain is what’s driving that. I don’t know. But that was a surprising thing to me too because I don’t really consider all those cultures all that different. They appear to be at least superficially quite similar cultures.
Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. And I mean, this is also where we kind of looked at individualistic versus collectivist cultures. Again, the United States or France and Germany and the UK, these are all individualistic cultures, whereas Asia, or you think of a country like Egypt or India, that’s more of a collectivist culture where it is harder for individuals to really share their true emotion, especially if it’s a negative or a critical emotion. And so that’s when we started observing that, “Hm.” And we are showing people in China ads, but they’re doing that in the presence of a moderator or a stranger, we were really getting just almost no meaningful data. It was just flat all the time.
Rana el Kaliouby: But when we kind of recognized that they’re not comfortable sharing truly how they feel, let’s change the environment. This is when actually, we saw no difference in the intensity of the emotion expressed compared to somebody in the United States. So it just shows you how, right, you have to be really careful how you craft the user experience, how you collect the data. Everything we do is consent-based so people know that the camera’s on, and of course they can choose to opt in or not. That’s very important to us. Yeah. But it’s really fascinating data.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. I think our listeners are pretty familiar with the concept of using some type of facial coding analysis, whether you call it emotion AI or something else, but in analyzing ads to see if they are likely to perform well in the marketplace before you run them. But I was really fascinated by the diversity of applications that you are exploring or users of your software are exploring. One of those was making people better teleconferencers, and as we’re speaking now, we are still in the rising phase of the coronavirus situation. So I’m expecting that we’re all going to be doing a lot more teleconferencing these days. How is emotion AI improving teleconferencing?
Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. You can imagine how … I’m sure you have done this before where you had to give a webinar to a remote audience and you don’t see them, right? You don’t even have the video thumbnails because there’s 150 dialed into this webinar.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. I did one of those just not too long ago and it was really kind of unsettling, because I was basically talking into a void for 40 minutes and there was no interaction. I had no inclination that people were in attendance. I mean, I could have lost my internet connection 30 seconds in and I would have had no clue until the end. For somebody who usually speaks in front of a live audience and has that feedback of whether they’re getting it, whether they’re engaged or whether maybe you need to switch gears, that was kind of a weird experience.
Rana el Kaliouby: Exactly. You’re spot on. That’s exactly right. And so now when you’re in this virtual world, this feedback loop is broken, right? So you can imagine how all 150 of your audience members, they’re all kind of watching you through a laptop that probably has a webcam, and I get it. Nobody wants their videos to be streamed necessarily while they’re watching. But what if we can just analyze in realtime their facial responses and aggregate all of that anonymously? So you don’t care how Rana responded individually, but you kind of want to know if the audience is engaged with you. If you crack a joke, did they laugh? Did people find it funny or not, right?
Rana el Kaliouby: That would be super awesome data. And that’s how we build energy when we’re presenting to an audience because we all riff off each other, right? And so I kind of envision a webinar or a live conference with a realtime graph, a readout of the audience’s engagement and valence, how positive or negative they’re responding to the content. So it’s not distracting seeing 100 mini thumbnails, but it’s an aggregate, right?
Rana el Kaliouby: I mean, I think there’s a huge opportunity to do that. And also, I think it’s not just important for the presenter. I actually think it’s important for the other kind of audience members too, because when you’re sitting at home dialed into a teleconference or a webinar or whatnot, it’s lonely. It’s such a lonely experience where I think if you’re contributing to this overall engagement graph, you feel part of it. You feel more connected, maybe. That’s my theory.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. That’s an interesting thought because you’re right, the people on the other end are kind of isolated too. And even if there’s something funny, they can’t hear other people laughing, so they’re still in their own world. But maybe if the emoji was interacting with them somehow, that would be … Interesting thought.
Roger Dooley: Another application that seemed really interesting but maybe a little bit creepy to me was using the technology for video job interviews, and this is apparently being done quite a bit. I guess you can tell us how common this is, and well, explain how that works and what a company might be looking for in terms of candidate analysis.
Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. And I do get that this does spark a lot of controversy, but at the core of it is this acknowledgement that, you know what? Humans are really biased when it comes to hiring, biased for all sorts of reasons, and often, subconsciously and unconsciously, right? People don’t really come into it with a clear kind of, “I’m going to be biased today. I’m going to be biased against these particular types of people.” It’s not how it works. Unfortunately, it’s often very kind of unintended and subconscious.
Rana el Kaliouby: So what these companies in this space are trying to do … Oh, the other thing is it’s really hard to quantify by looking at a word resume a person’s personality and a person’s EQ abilities, right, which are important, are particularly important for some types of jobs, like a customer service representative, a salesperson, a flight attendant where you need to have a high level of emotional intelligence and empathy.
Rana el Kaliouby: And so what these companies do is they offer candidates the opportunity to do a video interview. And so you’re asked to answer five questions, you record a video of yourself answering these five questions, you send it in, and the first exposure to your interview isn’t a human being that is biased. It’s an algorithm that is hopefully less biased. So the algorithm is gender blind. It’s ethnically blind. It’s age blind. What it’s looking for is of course, how you answered the question, but also your nonverbal communication skills. And that all kind of is used in a predictive model to score or rank your interview, which then gets kind of watched by an actual HR professional, right? So the algorithm doesn’t decide if you’re in or out, it just bubbles you up to the top if it thinks that you’re a good match for that particular job opportunity.
Rana el Kaliouby: I often get asked, “Okay, what about” … because I have worked a lot with individuals on the autism spectrum and I often get asked, “What about people who don’t have strong social skills like autistic kids?” And some of these companies actually work with that community because guess what? For an individual who’s autistic, going into an actual in person interview is usually extremely stressful. They can’t control the environment. They don’t know what it’s like. They don’t know the people. There’s so many unknowns. So a video interview kind of levels the playing field a little bit.
Rana el Kaliouby: Anyways, so I kind of appreciate the mission of a lot of these companies. And I do think there’s an opportunity to reduce bias in hiring. It has to be done in a very thoughtful way. Otherwise, to your point, it can be quite creepy.
Roger Dooley: Right. Well, human interviews are generally shown to be one of the worst hiring tools, maybe not for certain jobs, like perhaps in person sales. It’s almost like a work sample, so maybe there, it’s a little bit better. But for hiring a coder, maybe even a phone rep as you say, not so good. I guess I’m trying to understand how you determine a person’s EQ by how they interact with a machine answering questions. In other words, I could see if you measured them interacting with another human being, having a conversation going back and forth, but what are you looking for?
Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, so the set of questions, and these will depend on the job in particular, and just to clarify, we don’t do that. We provide our technology for some companies that are in that space, right? This is not a core market that we are focused on because it requires a lot of domain expertise, which I don’t have and we don’t have as a company. But at a high level it would look something like you’re given five questions, like, “What are you passionate about? What are you looking for in a job? Give me an example of a tough situation that you were in and how you managed through it,” right, some questions, “What are your strengths, what are your weaknesses?” And you would kind of spend a minute or so answering the question. So it’s not really a live interview with another human being and it’s not an interview with a chat bot. It’s just you answering these questions.
Rana el Kaliouby: And what we have found and what our partner companies have found is that the more expressive you are, the better. Again, kind of the top performers basically had a much wider gamut of expressiveness than, say, the lower performers. And again, this is very job-specific so I don’t want to overgeneralize it. Yeah, because our company, I mean, we hire … Two thirds of our company are machine learning scientists and software engineers. And I’m sure we would not skew that way, so I don’t want to generalize.
Roger Dooley: Right, right. Yeah. So I want to jump over to books, Rana. And in my book, Friction, I wrote about how national policies and cultures can impede entrepreneurship and economic growth. And I talk about the huge difference between India and China’s growth rates over the last few decades. And in part, I blame India’s under-performance on the obstacles that existed there from their License Raj area where you needed a license to do anything and everything to still maybe better today, but over the years of bureaucracy that really drove entrepreneurs either into the underground economy or they just found it easier to go abroad. And I wanted to get into cultural factors in my book, but I did not. I just ran out of time and space because I think that certain things in India, like the sort of lingering remnants of the caste system, religious conflict and so on, make it difficult to use 100% of that country’s talent.
Roger Dooley: But in reading Girl Decoded, I kind of saw something similar. You were able to get an amazing education and cofound a business in America, but really, you were quite the exception for women in Egypt and really, probably many other Middle Eastern countries. I’m just curious what your take on that is as far as is this impeding growth in these economies by not using all that talent, or will talent find a way to express itself regardless?
Rana el Kaliouby: I think talent is finding a way. I mean, there’s an amazing tech ecosystem developing in the Middle East and it’s very grassroots, so a lot of startups, which didn’t exist 20 years ago when I was kind of a graduate student. In fact, my parents, they were kind of … Having a startup was not cool in these cultures. And that’s really changing now.
Rana el Kaliouby: But fundamentally, what I found fascinating, because I spent a few years commuting between Boston and Cairo when I was at MIT Media Lab, and the Media Lab at MIT is just a super kind of risk-taking, rebellious environment. You got to be doing something different. You can’t be doing something that’s been done before. And I’d fly back to Cairo and kind of talk about my ideas and people would be like, “That’s so risky. Why are you doing that? It’s going to fail,” and said it as if, why inflict this upon myself?
Rana el Kaliouby: And so the juxtaposition of the two cultures and approaches really struck me, and I think it’s so critical for an entrepreneurial society to welcome failure and celebrate failure and I mean, see it as a learning opportunity and as a part of the journey and embrace risk. And I think there’s more of that happening in the Middle East, but we need a lot more for sure.
Roger Dooley: Funny story with your parents. I guess one thing I’ve learned after talking to a few hundred smart people on this show, sometimes being a successful entrepreneur means disappointing your parents, or at least for a while, disappointing them. I had to Safi Bahcall, author of Moonshots, on a while ago, and his parents were both well-accomplished physicists, and he too studied to be one, completed his degrees, and went to have a very promising career in physics, which he then abandoned to become an entrepreneur. And for a while, he was sort of the black sheep of the family, but it all worked out well in his case. And it looks like it’s worked out well in your case too.
Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, absolutely. So I was at MIT as a research scientist getting ready to apply for faculty when the opportunity to start Affectiva came along, and so I jumped on it and I kept the company secret from my parents for a couple of years because I knew that they would be so disappointed because from where they sat, I had the ultimate job, right? I was a researcher at MIT. What better job could I possibly have? And I didn’t want to disappoint them. I think they’ve come full circle. Yeah. They’re proud of Affectiva and the team and what we’re doing.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. I love that your dad was going to go on your first job interview with you. Not something you see, but I think that if you talk to HR executives, even in the states, you’ll find the occasional insecure applicant who’s accompanied by a parent.
Rana el Kaliouby: Well, I hope you haven’t been on job interviews with your daughter. You said she and I-
Roger Dooley: No, no, that would not have been permitted. It’s a cultural difference and I think that I’m sure is gradually changing too. But it was just kind of a funny story that it was even suggested as a being a good idea, although ultimately that didn’t happen, right?
Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. I think for him, because I was interviewing at this startup and the founder and I ended up getting married so I didn’t get the job, but I got the husband. That’s fine. But my dad just didn’t … he didn’t know what to make of a startup. He was like, “Okay, you can either work at a multinational or a university, but a startup? Why do that?” And again, I think this kind of thinking is changing now that there are many examples of really amazing successful startups in the Middle East and the world, right? So I think that’s changing.
Roger Dooley: Great. One area I’ve been focused on a lot lately is customer experience, and every day it seems like, whether I’m on web, on my phone or whatever, sometimes in person, I encounter frustrating digital and human experiences, and it seems like your technology could really help troubleshoot problematic points in the customer journey. I’m wondering what kind of work either you or your clients could be doing to improve customer experience?
Rana el Kaliouby: This is an area, to be honest, where I know there’s huge potential for our type of technology, but we haven’t really focused on it yet. It’s one of the things we want to kind of explore this year and beyond. But you’re absolutely right. What if we could capture moment by moment when you are on an app shopping online for whatever product or service and we could capture online, in the moment when you’re frustrated, when you’re confused because you can’t find the information, when it’s annoying because you’re bombarded with all sorts of things and then allow analytics offline for people to recraft the user experience and fix it or even get you just in time support and help, right, decide the right moment to pop up support or help. And I think this is equally interesting in the digital world, but also in the kind of actual brick and mortar universe. I think there’s a lot of customer experience things that we could do, like when you’re checking into a hotel or when you’re shopping in a store. I think that’s an amazing field of opportunity that yeah, there’s a lot to be done there.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. And the current tools are really pretty bad. Now, of course, I don’t know how you get people to opt in and advance, but I was going to check on some airline reservations today and I jumped on United.com with my computer that I’ve had for six years. And it says, “We don’t recognize your device,” and it started asking me questions, like what kind of books I read and stuff, my secret questions or whatever they are.
Roger Dooley: And this never happens to me at Amazon, but it happens to me every few weeks at United. And if they were somehow measuring my facial expressions at that point, I think even me, low-emoting Roger, would probably look pretty frustrated and angry at that particular second. And maybe if enough data points would say, “Hey, maybe we need to fix this,” and make that experience better.
Rana el Kaliouby: Powerful insights, right?
Roger Dooley: Yeah, exactly. And I know that apparently some voice menu systems have profanity detection, so they’ll detect if people are swearing at their voice menus and this is sort of the same kind of thing. You know that you’re causing people friction along the way, but where and how and how often and attaching an emotional component to that would really be valuable I think beyond just looking at, “This person’s been logged out six times in the last hour because of our automatic log out system. Maybe we need to dial that back a little bit,” I mean, you can get metrics like that, but I think capturing our emotion would be really valuable too.
Rana el Kaliouby: And also because often, right, at the end of whatever experience it is, you’ll get sent a survey and, “From one to 10, how satisfying was this experience?” Well, if you do a seven or a six or a five, it’s not actionable. Where in that experience did we lose you? And this is where this moment by moment metric, emotional metric or engagement metric or confusion metric, whatever it is, can make it very actionable because you know the why, right? You know when exactly it happened and you can debug what drove that negative emotion or frustration.
Roger Dooley: Well, I encourage you to pursue that, Rana. To wrap up, what would you say if you wanted to offer our listeners, say, the big takeaway or a big takeaway from Girl Decoded?
Rana el Kaliouby: The big takeaway I guess from Girl Decoded is first that we absolutely must advocate for a human-centric AI and a human-centric technology universe. We have to bring back the human at the center of all of this. And I guess the second, which is more broader, because my personal story, as you know, is interweaved in the book, it took me a long time to find my voice and kind of forge my own path and take ownership of that. And I hope my book will inspire and motivate others to do the same.
Roger Dooley: Well, it’s a fun read and I encourage our listeners who are looking for a break from the typical business book to check that out. And let me remind our listeners that we are speaking with Rana el Kaliouby, cofounder of Emotion AI from Affectiva and author of Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology. Rana, how can people find you?
Rana el Kaliouby: I am very easy to find online. You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. You can also go to RanaelKaliouby.com/girldecoded, where you will find more information about the book.
Roger Dooley: Awesome. Well, we will link to those places and to any other resources we spoke about on the show notes page at RogerDooley.com/podcast, and we’ll have a text version of our conversation there too. Rana, thanks for being on the show and best of luck with the book.
Rana el Kaliouby: Thank you for having me.
Thank you for tuning into this episode of Brainfluence. To find more episodes like this one, and to access all of Roger’s online writing and resources, the best starting point is RogerDooley.com.
And remember, Roger’s new book, Friction, is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and book sellers everywhere. Bestselling author Dan Pink calls it, “An important read,” and Wharton Professor Dr. Joana Berger said, “You’ll understand Friction’s power and how to harness it.”
For more information or for links to Amazon and other sellers, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction.
