Scientists have created a device that is able to tell when a person is being sarcastic.
A device can tell when a person is being sarcastic
Boffins at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have designed an algorithm that analyses somebody's speech to figure out whether they are using irony.
The device works by examining the pitch, talking rate and energy in speech and then transcribes the words into text so it can be studied for further language cues.
Xiyuan Gao, a PhD student at the university, said: "We extracted acoustic parameters such as pitch, speaking rate, and energy from speech, then used Automatic Speech Recognition to transcribe the speech into text for sentiment analysis.
"Next, we assigned emoticons to each speech segment, reflecting its emotional content.
"By integrating these multimodal cues into a machine learning algorithm, our approach leverages the combined strengths of auditory and textual information along with emoticons for a comprehensive analysis."