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emotion font

 Add subtlety to your emails
  (+7, -4)
(+7, -4) 		  [vote for,
against]

The problem with indicating emotion in email is that there is only “normal speech “ or “SHOUTING”. What we need is a font that can convey what the writer is feeling with a greater level of subtlety. The software detects which emotion by a combination of typing speed, pressure on the keyboard, proportion of long periods of thinking time etc. This is then indicated in the email by a change in colour, kerning or shape of the font. Anger for instance could be a combination of red for passion and a harsh angular font. Distress a jumbled array of letters. Love would be one of those soft edged sixties fonts. Probably with a sickening rainbow animation I think for this to be truly successful only the recipient will see which font the computer has chosen.

This is of course going to be most annoying. Watch while the AI software completely misjudges your mood. Send a happy happy joy joy resignation note to your boss. Alternatively, watch as it senses the underlying fear as you try to bluster your way out of a major screw-up at work.

—sugarat, Apr 20 2000

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       Just make it so that one can turn it off....
—Malakh, Apr 22 2000
   

       I can provide no link, but the group I was once in at MS investigated techniques for determining emotion from secondary input characteristics (mouse jitter, variations in keystroke frequency, number of typos, interface use patterns). The idea was to create a UI that would react appropriately.   

       The idea was deemed a failure at the time because the only emotions that could be reliably sensed were ones that you couldn't really do much about.   

       (Consider this situation, as a UI designer. You have a user who is clearly agitated, frustrated, and hurried; they have been working on a document for hours, making and remaking a number of changes, becoming more frantic as time goes by. As the operating system, it is now your task to inform this user that the application has crashed and that all their work is lost. Exactly what do you do?)   

       We never considered attaching that emotion to documents for other humans to interpret, though.
—egnor, Oct 22 2000
   

       Wow, crazy stuff.   

       I think just rendering key pressure as boldness, height, or size and timing as logarithmic x distance would make for a wonderous document indeed, maybe the digital equivalent of handwritten.
—jutta, Oct 28 2000
   

       [+]
—sweet, Oct 14 2006
   

       "I'm fine, I'm fine. I just splashed a drop of water on the keyboard and the email editor mistook it for a tear."
—phundug, Oct 15 2006
   

       I'm with [jutta] on this one. Direct control over the look of the text would enable you to convey emotions better while typing. The problems will arise from 'interpretation' by AI software.   

       Didn't someone post something like this a couple of days ago?
—wagster, Oct 16 2006
   


 

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