Speech Emotion Recognition Two Decades in a Nutshell, Benchmarks, and Ongoing Trends

COMMUNICATION WITH COMPUTING machinery has become increasingly 'chatty' these days: Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and many more dialogue systems have hit the consumer market on a broader basis than ever, but do any of them truly notice our emotions and react to them like a human conversational partner would? In fact, the discipline of automatically recognizing human emotion and affective states from speech, usually referred to as Speech Emotion Recognition or SER for short, has by now surpassed the "age of majority, " celebrating the 22nd anniversary after the seminal work of Daellert et al. in 199610-arguably the first research paper on the topic. However, the idea has existed even longer, as the first patent dates back to the late 1970s. © 2018 ACM.