Human communication weaves speech, language, and nonverbal behaviour into a continuous exchange of meaning and emotion. Understanding this interplay opens new possibilities for AI to recognise human needs, respond intelligently, and support health. This keynote traces the way from sensing emotion to building multimodal systems that assess human states and traits and engage meaningfully with people. Drawing on advances in speech and language foundation models, multimodal learning, and affective computing, it explores applications ranging from mental health assessment to emotionally responsive artificial companions. Generative AI brings the other half of communication to life: voices that convey emotion, faces that give expression to meaning, and virtual humans that turn prediction into interaction. The vision is multimodal communication intelligence that connects what people express with how they feel—and uses that understanding to help improve their lives.

Professor Björn W. Schuller is a leading force in speech intelligence, affective computing, and multimodal health AI. His research has helped define how machines analyse human voice, recognise emotion, and interpret behaviour for health and intelligent interaction. He holds the Chair of Health Informatics at the Technical University of Munich and is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Imperial College London, where he leads the Group on Language, Audio & Music. As co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of audEERING, he brings this research into commercial audio intelligence. His record includes 1,500+ publications, 90,000+ citations, an h-index above 130, and more than 50 awards. He holds Fellowships of ACM, IEEE, ISCA, ELLIS, BCS, and AAAC, recognising contributions across computer audition, affective computing, and health informatics. An ERC Starting Grant recipient, he was selected by the World Economic Forum among 40 extraordinary scientists under 40. His leadership extends across the institutions that shape the discipline: former Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Editor-in-Chief of AI Open, Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Digital Health, and President-Emeritus of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing. An ACM Distinguished Speaker and IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer, Schuller’s work spans the full arc of the field—from foundational methods in speech and emotion recognition to generative, multimodal systems for human interaction and health. His expertise is sought by companies including Huawei, Samsung, Barclays, and GN, while 300+ media appearances and contributions—spanning The Guardian, The Times, Scientific American, Newsweek, and MIT Technology Review—bring his work into the global conversation on AI.