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Chapter 9CREATING EMOTION RECOGNITION AGENTSFOR SPEECH SIGNALValery A. PetrushinAccenture Technology LabsAbstractThis chapter presents agents for emotion recognition in speech and their applicationto a real world problem. The agents can recognize five emotional states—unemotional, happiness, anger, sadness, and fear—with good accuracy, and beadapted to a particular environment depending on parameters of speech signaland the number of target emotions. A practical application has been developedusing an agent that is able to analyze telephone quality speech signal and to distinguishbetween two emotional states—“agitation” and “calm”. This agent hasbeen used as a part of a decision support system for prioritizing voice messagesand assigning a proper human agent to respond the message at a call center.1. IntroductionThis study explores how well both people and computers can recognizeemotions in speech, and how to build and apply emotion recognition agentsfor solving practical problems. The first monograph on expression of emotionsin animals and humans was written by Charles Darwin in the 19th century [4].After this milestone work psychologists have gradually accumulated knowledgein this field. A new wave of interest has recently risen attracting both psychologistsand artificial intelligence (AI) specialists. There are several reasonsfor this renewed interest such as: technological progress in recording, storing,and processing audio and visual information; the development of non-intrusivesensors; the advent of wearable computers; the urge to enrich human-computerinterface from point-and-click to sense-and-feel; and the invasion on our computersof life-like agents and in our homes of robotic animal-like devices likeTiger’s Furbies and Sony’s Aibo, which are supposed to be able express, haveand understand emotions [6]. A new field of research in AI known as affectivecomputing has recently been identified [10]. As to research on recognizingemotions in speech, on one hand, psychologists have done many experiments