Emotive alert: HMM-based emotion detection in voicemail messages

Voicemail has become an integral part of our personal and professional communication. The number of messages that accumulate in our voice mailboxes necessitate new ways of prioritizing them. Currently, we are forced to actively listen to all messages in order to find out which ones are important and which ones can be attended to later on. In this paper, we describe Emotive Alert, a system that can detect some of the significant emotions in a new message and notify the account owner along various affective axes, including urgency, formality, valence (happy vs. sad) and arousal (calm vs. excited). We have used a purely acoustic, HMM-based approach for identifying the emotions, which allows application of this system to all messages independent of language.