Emotion recognition

Emotion recognition is the clearest case in the Act of the same technology carrying three different legal statuses depending on where it points: prohibited at work and in schools, high-risk in most other settings, and outside the definition entirely when it detects physical states rather than emotions. That makes the deployment context — not the model — the compliance question, and it makes vendor claims about "sentiment" or "engagement" features worth reading very carefully before a contract is signed.

A contact-centre platform offers real-time agent-coaching that infers agent frustration from voice. Pointed at employees this is emotion inference in the workplace and prohibited. The same vendor's feature that infers *customer* sentiment from a call is not caught by the workplace ban, but it is high-risk biometric territory and triggers the Article 50 duty to inform the customers exposed to it. One product, two features, two entirely different outcomes.

Assuming text-based sentiment analysis is caught. The definition turns on inferring emotions from *biometric* data — voice, face, physiological signals. Analysing the words in a written review is not emotion recognition under the Act, though it may raise other issues; conversely, relabelling a facial-analysis feature as "engagement scoring" changes nothing.

Can we use emotion recognition on employees?

No. Article 5 prohibits emotion-inference systems in the workplace, with a narrow exception for systems intended for medical or safety reasons such as fatigue detection in safety-critical roles.

Is emotion recognition allowed on customers?

It is not prohibited outside workplace and education contexts, but it is generally high-risk under Annex III(1) and the deployer must inform the people exposed to the system under Article 50(3), in addition to complying with data-protection law.

Does text sentiment analysis count as emotion recognition?

Not under the Act's definition, which requires inference of emotions or intentions on the basis of biometric data. Text analysis is outside that definition, though other obligations may still apply to the system it sits in.