When I was working at the IBM Speech group circa 1999 as a contractor on an embedded speech system (IBM Personal Speech Assistant), I discussed with Raimo Bakis (a researcher there then) this issue of such metadata and how it might improve conversational speech recognition. It turned out that IBM ViaVoice detected some of that metadata (like pitch/tone as a reflection of emotion) -- but then on purpose threw it away rather than using it for anything. Back then it was so much harder to get speech recognition to do anything useful -- beyond limited transcripts of audio with ~5% error rates that was good enough mainly for searching -- that perhaps doing that made sense. Very interesting to see such metadata in use now both in speech recognition and in speech generation.

More on the IBM Personal Speech Assistant for which I am on a patent (since expired) by Liam Comerford:
http://liamcomerford.com/alphamodels3.html
"The Personal Speech Assistant was a project aimed at bringing the spoken language user interface into the capabilities of hand held devices. David Nahamoo called a meeting among interested Research professionals, who decided that a PDA was the best existing target. I asked David to give me the Project Leader position, and he did. On this project I designed and wrote the Conversational Interface Manager and the initial set of user interface behaviors. I led the User Interface Design work, set specifications and approved the Industrial Design effort and managed the team of local and offsite hardware and software contractors. With the support of David Frank I interfaced it to a PC based Palm Pilot emulator. David wrote the Palm Pilot applications and the PPOS extensions and tools needed to support input from an external process. Later, I worked with IBM Vimercati (Italy) to build several generations of processor cards for attachment to Palm Pilots. Paul Fernhout, translated (and improved) my Python based interface manager into C and ported it to the Vimercati coprocessor cards. Jan Sedivy's group in the Czech Republic Ported the IBM speech recognizer to the coprocessor card. Paul, David and I collaborated on tools and refining the device operation. I worked with the IBM Design Center (under Bob Steinbugler) to produce an industrial design. I ran acoustic performance tests on the candidate speakers and microphones using the initial plastic models they produced, and then farmed the design out to Insync Designs to reduce it to a manufacturable form. Insync had never made a functioning prototype so I worked closely with them on Physical UI and assemblability issues. Their work was outstanding. By the end of the project I had assembled and distributed nearly 100 of these devices. These were given to senior management and to sales personnel."

Thanks for the fun/educational/interesting times, Liam!

As a bonus for that work, I had been offered one of the chessboards that been used when IBM Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, but I turned it down as I did not want a symbol around of AI defeating humanity.

Twenty-five years later, how far that aspiration towards conversational speech with computers has come. Some ideas I've put together to help deal with the fallout:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Another idea for dealing with the consequences is using AI to facilitate Dialogue Mapping with IBIS for meetings to help small groups of people collaborate better on "wicked problems" like dealing with AI's pros and cons (like in this 2019 talk I gave at IBM's Cognitive Systems Institute Group).
https://twitter.com/sumalaika/status/1153279423938007040

Talk outline here: https://cognitive-science.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/CS...

A video of the presentation:
https://cognitive-science.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/zo...