Emoshape

Emoshape, also known as MetaSoul, is a technology company focused on infusing artificial intelligence with emotional capabilities. Founded in London by Patrick Levy-Rosenthal, the company is now based in New York City. Levy-Rosenthal, a Parisian-born entrepreneur, has a background that includes investment banking and a history of inventions, such as a system for translating stock quotes into voice with emotional tones and the 2006 Virtual Lens technology, a precursor to social media photo filters. His exploration into the relationship between cognition and emotion led to the development of Emoshape's core technology.

The company's primary offering is a technology centered around an Emotion Processing Unit (EPU), a microchip, and a cloud-based platform that enables AI to synthesize and experience emotions, rather than merely recognizing them. This technology, protected by patents, is designed to allow machines to process and react to stimuli with twelve primary emotions, including joy, fear, and trust, as well as sensations like pain and pleasure. The system can compute up to 64 trillion distinct emotional states every tenth of a second, allowing an AI to develop a unique personality and emotional profile over time through user interaction and reinforcement learning. The technology operates on a psycho-evolutionary theory that expands on Ekman's work on emotions.

Emoshape's business model appears to be multi-faceted, targeting a wide range of industries including robotics, gaming, automotive, and consumer electronics. The company offers its technology through various forms, including a cloud service API, a USB dongle for developers, and a System-on-Chip (SoC) for autonomous humanoid robotics. One of its products, MetaSoul®, allows users to create a sentient digital entity for avatars or non-player characters (NPCs) in gaming and the metaverse, which evolves based on interactions. This is also being extended to an in-car AI companion application for the Apple Watch. The company has made its Enhanced OpenAI Persona API available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and has demonstrated integrations with Microsoft's Neural Text-to-Speech to enhance vocal expressiveness.

The company's technology aims to provide a more natural and empathetic interaction between humans and machines. By enabling AI to 'feel', the goal is to create more engaging user experiences, whether in gaming, providing companionship, or even in healthcare applications. For example, their technology has been shown to improve the caregiver environment by 32% when controlling synthesized voices. Clients are global companies across various sectors, and major tech companies are reportedly using the technology in their language and learning models (LLMs).

Keywords: emotional intelligence AI, emotion synthesis, Emotion Processing Unit, EPU, MetaSoul, digital sentience, AI personas, Patrick Levy-Rosenthal, affective computing, robotics, emotional AI, synthetic emotions, human-robot interaction, AI companion, digital soul, emotion chip, NPC emotional intelligence, reinforcement learning, Myers-Briggs AI, sentient digital entity