Microsoft has filed a patent for technology that will allow Xbox games to read a player's emotions. This tech will allow games to receive audio streams through voice chat as players engage with their favorite games in order to analyze the player's emotional response to what's happening.
This Microsoft patent comes as a result of two major things, one of which being the expansion of voice chat in multiplayer games on Xbox. The other is some of the repercussions of this expansion are gamers being met with excessively aggressive or rude behavior. The patent notes that many of these profanity and insult-laden responses may cause emotional harm and the anonymity of online gaming makes it a complex issue.
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The technology in the patent will observe visual emotional cues in addition to audio characteristics. It uses vocal-characteristic models in order to analyze the audio streams from multiuser sessions. The emotional states that the technology may follow include anger, fear, disgusts, and sadness. The emotion in a player's voice may not only be analyzed in this manner but remembered for historical data in the future.
The Microsoft technology would detect neutral speech and create a speech profile around the way an Xbox player responds emotionally from there. It would analyze pitch, voice variation, energy level, and speech rate. Changes to these may indicate a player's emotional response to what the patent calls the "virtual environment" that players communicate in using voice chat.
The patent shows a technology that will follow a player's emotional states beyond simply observing reactions as they happen, but it also sets a reputation score for users based on their emotions as well. It can detect specific vocal properties based on how consistent they are with predefined emotional states. It's currently unclear how Microsoft will use the data to benefit Xbox games.
The technology in this Microsoft patent utilizes trained machine learning algorithms in order to categorize the emotional response to a game into anger, fear, etc. As a result, this algorithm may learn to identify specific vocal properties that are consistent across groups of various conversations. Beyond algorithms, a player will also have profile information that the new technology in the recent Microsoft patent will analyze as well.
According to the patent, a reputation score can be created for multiple users and it's determined by analyzing historical data. Reputation scores are based on various factors including complaints regarding a user profile, how many other users have a user profile blocked, and how many times was the user profile suspended or banned. In this way, the new Microsoft technology can easily identify a player that has a history of getting angry while gaming on Xbox.
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