Artificial intelligence never ceases to amaze us with its multitude of uses. In this very specific we do not believe that many people end up very happy since, being a machine, its predictions are really tricky.

Speaking, communicating, expressing your feelings through words, is difficult to identify, for many of us, to know if he is telling the truth or if, on the contrary, he is hiding something from us.

And it is that, only with our tone of voice thousands of nuances can be identified. But, for this there is technology and very specifically artificial intelligence (AI).

New research, just published in the journal PLOS-ONE, has analyzed the vocal characteristics of 134 couples in therapy. They used computers to extract standard speech features from recordings of participants in therapy sessions over two years.

What features are we talking about? pitch, pitch variation, and intonation. Next, a machine learning algorithm was trained to learn the relationship between those vocal characteristics and the final result of the therapy.

This analysis went further and did not focus on whether someone raised their voice, but on the conversational interaction, who spoke when and for how long, as well as the sound of voices.

Thanks to this, the experts, collaborating with this function, have been able to expose these results to couples. The importance lies in reveal how much information about our underlying feelings is encoded in the way we speakpart of it expressed completely unconsciously.

This may be one of the first steps in using computers to determine what we really think or feel.

The incredible thing about all this is the thousands of possibilities of use: the experts could advise us on aspects to change when listening to us talk together, yes, but, could they detect a propensity for antisocial behavior, violence, or depression? It seems that the answer is also yes.

Perhaps the only problem that all this could present is the “violation of our privacy” seeing ourselves subjected to a machine that is going to analyze each one of our words and how we express them. It is also true that if we really go to therapy and want to solve our relationship problems, what better than going to the root of these.