Kevin Knull, Gründer der Emotion AI Application Truthify "Artificial intelligence is frankly in its infancy stage of development"

Kevin Knull ©Kevin Knull

marktforschung.de: Kevin, how did you come up with the idea of an Emotion AI Application?

Kevin Knull: It all started with a well-meant but completely misunderstood text message. I spent the next few hours trying to overcome the misunderstanding, and it dawned on me that our over-reliance on digital communications and an "always-on" mentality with our cell phones have created an enormous problem. We’ve lost a lot of the connection and humanity in how we personally interact and there must be a solution. I believe that artificial intelligence (AI), and Emotion AI specifically, can bring some of that empathy back into our lives and interactions, which is why we founded Truthify. Whether you’re a market research firm, a brand, a marketer, a political figure, or a consumer, we can all benefit from more honest and emotion-based feedback from the people around us, instead of settling for the interactions devoid of emotion that have become the new normal with digital communication.

marktforschung.de: How does it work?

Kevin Knull: Our app enables insight-driven decision making and planning while engaging audiences, stakeholders and buyers in a completely different way. Anyone that wants to identify emotional reactions to their message or content can use to upload or record a video and send it to an endless number of recipients. The recipient watches the video message after enabling camera permissions, and then the app uses Emotion AI to identify the recipient’s subconscious emotional reaction to the sender’s message and shares the reaction with both the sender and recipient.

marktforschung.de: Your app identifies seven different emotions -  how high is the error rate?

Kevin Knull: Truthify is able to measure anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. Based on the extensive training of the Emotion AI algorithms underpinning the app, we’re able to detect emotions with 95% accuracy.

marktforschung.de: Why do you think that this methodology works better than any other research method?

Kevin Knull: Until now, brands haven’t had a means of quickly identifying the true reactions of their audience. Truthify is a more modern solution to help brands, market researchers, advertisers, and others gain audience feedback that is immediate, authentic, and actionable. For the brand, knowing how a message is received by its audience before it is widespread could be very beneficial, and it could either help drive increased revenue, prevent significant losses, or avoid public relations missteps. This is honest feedback measured at 14 times per second, and it goes far beyond a "like" button, or a response to a survey. Due to running on a mobile device, the app allows for more scalable and immediate feedback than traditional research methods, making the technology especially exciting for application in the market research space.

marktforschung.de: Today, we are able to measure emotions  - what kind of development do you predict in this area for the next ten years?  

Kevin Knull: Artificial intelligence is frankly in its infancy stage of development, and will continue to develop at a blistering rate. I suspect that multi-modal Emotion AI will at some point blend face, voice, and body movement to provide a far more accurate result. Soon thereafter, far sooner than ten years, we’ll start to see applications across a number of industries beyond just market research and advertising. Healthcare is an area where I see a lot of opportunity. For example, Emotion AI could be overlaid on top of real-time health data to create predictive solutions. Or, even today, we see potential for Truthify and Emotion AI to help people communicate better, such as those that are autistic or deaf - both of which may make it harder to understand people’s emotions. Emotion AI can add significant value in terms of injecting humanity, understanding and empathy into interactions. And it’s anyone’s guess as to where it will stop.
 
marktforschung.de: Truthify in five years is…

Kevin Knull: It’s hard to say. We have some significant enhancements we will be launching in the next two months that will enable some very interesting and potentially disruptive use cases.  Every brand, business, politician, employer, spouse, parent, and friend is wondering how someone else truly feels about something, but we don’t yet know who will value that insight the most. We’re in the early days, but it will be exciting to see how this mobile technology is used.

About Kevin Knull
Kevin Knull, CEO & Co-Founder of Truthify, is a veteran of the financial technology and financial services industries.  Most recently, he was the President of PIEtech, the leading financial planning software company in the financial services industry.  He has held senior roles at other firms such as Symetra and the Hartford Financial Group. He is a certified financial planner, the author of "Exploring Advice", and a graduate of the United States Coast Guard Academy.