A Northern Ireland team is leading a research that would build upon attempts to develop a kind of program which could allow machines to sense and respond to the moods of the users. While it sounds like science fiction, computers which could respond to human emotion would emerge. Emotion is part of normal speech, and experience has shown that most users are deeply uncomfortable with speech modes that ignore it —— too uncomfortable to use them very much. Therefore, if we can make computers more emotion-sensitive and expressive, and also less challenging to use, there is enormous potential to let people make fuller use of information technology.