Expression Measurement for Emotional Intelligence

Key Findings:

• Granular Emotional Profiling: Hume’s Expression Measurement API enabled IRIS Insights to detect 48 nuanced emotions in spoken conversations, providing emotional context traditional sentiment tools cannot access.

• Smarter Call Center Intelligence: With line-by-line emotion analysis, IRIS helps contact centers surface root causes of churn, personalize agent coaching, and improve overall service quality. In just one month, IRIS processed over 2,000 calls using Hume’s emotional signal layer, with 34% flagged as emotionally positive and only 4% as negative. Meanwhile, 62% of calls were labeled neutral, helping teams pinpoint disengagement that might otherwise be overlooked.

• Expansion into Corrections: IRIS is piloting conversational monitoring in correctional facilities to proactively identify inmates at heightened risk of self-harm or suicide. By analyzing both what is said and how it is said, the tool quantifies the urgency of each case—enabling timely mental health intervention and more effective allocation of support resources to help save lives.

Emotion as Infrastructure: The IRIS Approach

IRIS Insights (formerly EarningsEdge AI) is an AI-powered conversational intelligence platform helping organizations, from contact centers to correctional departments, turn human interactions into actionable emotional insight. Their mission is to decode not just what was said in a conversation, but how it was felt.

By exclusively integrating Hume’s Expression Measurement API, IRIS adds a precise emotional layer to its language analysis stack. This allows teams to detect subtle changes in tone like frustration, confusion, or disengagement across every customer or inmate interaction. In QA workflows, IRIS has seen measurable gains: average CSAT scores now sit at 66/100, and etiquette scores hit a perfect 50/50. Dead air—a marker of low engagement—was tracked at 15%, driving new coaching initiatives to improve flow and emotional continuity.

The Challenge: Surface What Sentiment Tools Miss

Traditional sentiment tools lacked the resolution and accuracy to meet IRIS’s needs. They relied on general tonal scoring or binary classifications, which often missed key emotional shifts.

IRIS needed an API that could deliver fine-grained emotional data, capturing dozens of distinct expressions moment by moment, allowing teams to identify high-risk moments, coach more effectively, and better understand client behavior.

The Solution: Precision Through Emotion Layering

Hume’s Expression Measurement API offered the emotional depth IRIS was looking for:

• Word-by-Word Emotion Detection: Unlike tools that deliver vague sentiment, the API outputs 48 distinct emotions per utterance including empathy, anxiety, frustration, and relief.

• Emotion-Based Prioritization: CX and QA teams use emotional spikes to flag calls worth reviewing and intervene proactively.

• Seamless Integration: With a clean, well-documented API and easy-to-use output format, integration into IRIS’s core analytics engine required minimal engineering effort.

IRIS Insights Tools Powered by Hume:

Emotion Analytics Engine: Surfaces emotional intensity across customer conversations, helping teams understand not just outcomes—but the emotional drivers behind them.

Behavioral Coaching Layer: Enables real-time, emotion-informed agent coaching based on how interactions unfold emotionally—not just by what’s said.

Correctional Monitoring Suite: Applies emotion tracking to inmate communication, enabling early detection of rising distress or risk patterns.

Impact: Emotion as a Differentiator

Since embedding Hume’s Expression Measurement API, IRIS clients have experienced:

• Clearer Visibility into Sentiment: Emotional signals like rising anxiety or disengagement are now measurable and actionable.

“We were blind to what our customers were feeling until we had emotion as a signal. Now we coach smarter and intervene faster,” shared a CX Manager at one partner company.

• Improved Agent Performance: Coaching is more personalized, grounded in emotion-driven feedback instead of static transcripts. Coaching programs now use emotion trends to target specific skills—such as objection handling, recap, and probing questions—which previously scored between 24–64% across QA reviews.

A Head of QA described it this way: “Expression Measurement filled the emotional gap in our analytics. It turned gut feelings into data points.” 

• Market Differentiation: Early customers cite emotion analysis as a unique value-add that legacy QA and sentiment tools fail to deliver.

• A major milestone: IRIS earned regulatory approval to pilot its correctional platform—validating the importance of emotional intelligence in public safety contexts.

Conclusion: Making Emotion Actionable

The partnership between IRIS Insights and Hume AI is setting a new standard for emotion-aware intelligence. By layering Hume’s Expression Measurement API into its analytics engine, IRIS enables clients to move from reactive metrics to proactive, emotionally informed action.

Whether it’s preventing customer churn or detecting rising distress in a correctional setting, IRIS is showing that emotion is no longer invisible—it’s measurable, operational, and transformative.

For more information on how empathic AI can enhance your digital solutions, please contact Hume AI.