New hackathon to detect emotions in voices

Bengaluru: Cloud telephony company Exotel has launched a 18-day hackathon for algorithmic programmers, data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts to build a system that will be able to detect the emotions in conversations.

"It's an online hackathon and participants can take part from anywhere across India. It's team participation where each team can have maximum three members," Exotel said in a release.

"The winning team will be awarded the prize money of Rs.3 lakh, runners-up team will get Rs.1 lakh and top 10 teams will get gift vouchers worth Rs.5,000 each," the release said.

According to the company, the idea of the hackathon is to devise a system that will be able to detect the emotions in conversations.

"Indians love to talk; voice still remains the most common communication medium. There are a million cool hacks that can be done with voice. Especially in the Indian context, with hundreds of languages and accents, this problem gets even more interesting and challenging," Shivakumar Ganesan, co-founder of Exotel, said.

"We specifically chose this problem for the hackathon to see how some of the brightest minds solve it. Connecting with developers who'd like to work with us will be a plus but not our primary goal", he added.

In order to win the hackathon, participants will have to use speech recognition algorithms and machine learning, to write code that can take voice as an input and recognize the emotion behind it.

The code then will be run across thousands of other voice samples and the algorithm with the most accurate results will be adjudged the winner, the company said.