Top 10 Best Emotion Detection Software of 2026

Affectiva is a pioneering emotion AI platform specializing in facial expression analysis to detect and measure human emotions in real-time from video or images. It identifies a broad spectrum of emotions including joy, anger, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, contempt, plus valence and engagement metrics, alongside demographics like age, gender, and ethnicity. Widely adopted in automotive for driver monitoring, market research for audience reactions, and advertising for consumer insights, it leverages one of the largest datasets of labeled facial data for high accuracy across diverse populations.

Hume AI (hume.ai) is a cutting-edge platform for multimodal emotion detection, analyzing emotions from voice, facial expressions, and text in real-time using advanced AI models. It provides APIs for developers to integrate empathic understanding into applications like virtual assistants, customer service bots, and mental health tools. The platform stands out for its focus on prosocial, empathetic responses generated based on detected emotional states.

Amazon Rekognition is a fully managed AWS service that uses deep learning to analyze images and videos for face detection, including emotion recognition such as happy, sad, angry, surprised, disgusted, calm, confused, and fearful, with confidence scores. It supports both stored and streaming video analysis, making it suitable for applications like customer sentiment analysis or security monitoring. The service integrates seamlessly with other AWS tools for scalable, real-time processing.

Microsoft Azure AI Face is a cloud-based API within Azure Cognitive Services that detects human faces in images and videos, analyzing attributes including age, gender, and emotions like happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and contempt. It provides confidence scores for each emotion, enabling real-time sentiment analysis for applications such as customer service, gaming, and market research. The service scales effortlessly with Azure infrastructure and integrates with other AI tools for comprehensive solutions.

Google Cloud Vision API is a comprehensive cloud-based image analysis service from Google Cloud that includes robust face detection with emotion recognition as a key feature. It processes images to identify faces and evaluates emotional expressions such as joy, sorrow, anger, and surprise, assigning likelihood scores ranging from VERY_LIKELY to VERY_UNLIKELY. This makes it suitable for applications requiring automated emotion detection in photos, videos, or live streams, with seamless integration into developer workflows.

Clarifai is a comprehensive AI platform focused on computer vision, offering pre-trained models for emotion detection that analyze facial expressions in images and videos to identify emotions like anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise. It enables developers to integrate emotion recognition into applications via a simple API, supporting both real-time and batch processing. The platform stands out for combining emotion detection with hundreds of other visual AI models for multifaceted analysis.

Kairos (kairos.com) is an AI-powered API platform specializing in facial analysis, including emotion detection from static images and video streams. It identifies seven core emotions—joy, anger, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, and neutral—with confidence scores for each. The service supports real-time processing and integrates seamlessly into web, mobile, and IoT applications for use cases like customer experience analytics and interactive media.

MorphCast is an AI-driven platform specializing in real-time facial emotion recognition and mood detection that operates entirely in the browser. It analyzes facial expressions to identify emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, contempt, disgust, and neutral states, along with engagement metrics like focus and mood quadrants. This enables applications in personalized content delivery, advertising optimization, and audience analytics without compromising user privacy.

IBM Watson Tone Analyzer is a cloud-based AI service that analyzes text input to detect various tones, including five core emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, and sadness. It also identifies language tones like analytical, confident, and tentative, as well as social tones based on Big Five personality traits. This makes it suitable for applications requiring nuanced emotional and attitudinal insights from written communication.

Noldus FaceReader is a professional-grade facial expression analysis software designed for automatic emotion detection from video footage. It recognizes six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust), plus neutral, arousal, and valence, using advanced algorithms based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Primarily used in research settings like psychology, market research, and UX studies, it offers detailed timelines, heatmaps, and exportable reports for in-depth analysis.