Presenting Emotion-Ally, a plug-in that helps you be more emotionally conscious in your digital communications.

Empower Me uses emotion recognition software developed by Affectiva, an emerging leader in the field of emotional artificial intelligence. Almost three decades ago, Rosalind Picard, a professor at the MIT Media Lab, began looking into the intersection of emotions and machine learning. Most people at that time considered such a thing to be irrelevant, but Picard believed that giving machines emotional awareness was crucial in writing software that interacts with people. In 1997, she published her findings in a book, Affective Computing.

Think about the different ways that you recognize the emotions of others in your daily life. Do you focus on their facial expression? Their body language? Or their tone of voice? While some of us may do these things in our daily lives without thinking twice, for children with autism it is often difficult to communicate their emotions and recognize the emotions of others. Parents and educators often find that their children or students with autism display inappropriate behaviors due to their difficulty recognizing and communicating their emotions.