Affectiva

What Affectiva is

Affectiva builds emotion AI: it reads facial expressions, vocal tone and body language to estimate emotional and cognitive states, selling into advertising research and in-cabin automotive systems.

What you can do with it

• Test how audiences emotionally respond to ads
• Study engagement across content and programming
• Monitor driver attention and state in vehicles
• Add emotion metrics to brand research
• Benchmark emotional response across creative variants

Who it is for

• Advertising and media researchers
• Automotive human-factors teams
• UX and brand research groups

What to watch out for

• Category misplacement: perception analytics, not a digital human generator
• Emotion inference is probabilistic and culturally variable; expressions do not reliably map to feelings
• Facial analysis is biometric-adjacent processing; consent, purpose limitation and data retention are legal duties
• Driver monitoring raises surveillance ethics questions; transparency with users is required
• Inner states cannot be read from faces with certainty; treat outputs as research signals