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An emotion perception engine might sound like something straight out of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, but it’s not designed to help replicant androids with their love lives. Rather, it’s software that attempts to perceive emotions in emails and tags them with the appropriate icons (WO 02/44991). Diehard emailers often use smiley and sad emoticons, like :-) or : (to spice up their missives. But they may soon be saved the bother: Digital Agent in South Korea has developed software that decides on the underlying emotional feel of a piece of text as it passes through a mail server or even a cellphone text message centre. Individual words are tagged happy, sad, nice or nasty, and it looks for telltale punctuation, such as exclamation marks. When it has decided on your overall mood, it’ll insert what it feels is the definitive icon. But who would trust a computer to make this decision?