The company claimed its AI understood human emotions, cognitive states, activities and the objects people use, by analyzing facial and vocal expressions.

Both of Affectiva's early products grew out of collaborative research at the MIT's Media Lab to help people on the autism spectrum.

Affectiva's AI is built with deep learning, computer vision, and large amounts of data that has been collected in real-world scenarios.

[21] Affectiva has collected massive amounts of data that are used to train and test the company's deep learning algorithms, and provide insight into human emotional reactions and engagement.

[24] Other uses of Affectiva's AI includes applications in automotive,[25] healthcare[26][27] and mental health,[28] robotics,[29] conversational interfaces,[30] education,[31][32] gaming,[33][34] and more.

[36] These insights helped improve brand and media content, and predict key metrics in advertising such as sales lift, purchase intent and virality.

[24] In addition to understanding driver and occupant emotional and cognitive states, Affectiva Automotive AI could also detect contextual cabin information such as the number of passengers, where they are sitting and if an object is present.