Zara, or ‘Zara the Supergirl’ is a virtual robot, that can exhibit empathy while interacting with an user, with the aid of its built in facial and emotion recognition, sentiment analysis, and speech module. At the end of the 5-10 minute conversation, Zara can give a personality analysis of the user based on all the user utterances. We have also implemented a real-time emotion recognition, using a CNN model that detects emotion from raw audio without feature extraction, and have achieved an average of 65.7% accuracy on six different emotion classes, which is an impressive 4.5% improvement from the conventional feature based SVM classification. Also, we have described a CNN based sentiment analysis module trained using out-of-domain data, that recognizes sentiment from the speech recognition transcript, which has a 74.8 F-measure when tested on human-machine dialogues.

In this paper, we present a music retrieval and recommendation system using machine learning techniques. We propose a query by humming system for music retrieval that uses deep neural networks for note transcription and a note-based retrieval system for retrieving the correct song from the database. We evaluate our query by humming system using the standard MIREX QBSH dataset. We also propose a similar artist recommendation system which recommends similar artists based on acoustic features of the artists’ music, online text descriptions of the artists and social media data. We use supervised machine learning techniques over all our features and compare our recommendation results to those produced by a popular similar artist recommendation website.