Abstract
This study explores Quantum AI’s potential in enhancing Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems. Our primary objective is to evaluate the performance of quantum-inspired algorithms compared to classical machine-learning approaches in accurately identifying and classifying emotions from speech signals. We hypothesise that quantum computing techniques can improve the efficiency and accuracy of emotion recognition, particularly in handling complex, highdimensional acoustic data. We developed a hybrid quantum-classical model that combines quantum-inspired neural networks with traditional feature extraction techniques. Our approach utilises quantum circuits for data encoding and quantum variational algorithms for classification. We implemented quantum versions of support vector machines (QSVM) and quantum approximate optimisation algorithms (QAOA) for emotion classification tasks. These quantum methods were compared against a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short Term (LSTM). The hybrid network is called a Convolutional Long Short Term network(CLSTM). The study employed a custom dataset for speech emotion recognition. We prepossessed the audio data to extract relevant acoustic features, including mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), pitch, and energy. In contrast, our implemented quantum-inspired model for this corpus showed lower performance, with the highest training accuracy of 30%, struggling with most emotions but performing best with ’Trust’. These varied results across different implementations suggest that while Quantum AI techniques show promise in advancing speech emotion recognition, their effectiveness may depend on the specific dataset, language, and model architecture used. Finally, the speed of a simulated quantum network is shown to outperform current methods in terms of matrix multiplication by leaps and bounds.