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Quantum AI in Speech Emotion Recognition

Michael Norval, Zenghui Wang

Published Nov 26, 2025• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.3390/e27121201

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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.
This paper proposes hybrid quantum machine learning (QML) models for automatic emotion recognition from human speech signals. The proposed quantum support vector machine (QSVM) and hybrid quantum neural network (HQNN) models use Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) as the features extracted from the speech data. We present a detailed analysis comparing the performance of QML models to conventional machine learning models for human speech-based emotion recognition, which is a multi-class classification problem. Our results illustrate that QSVM can achieve higher classification accuracy with a much reduced number of speech signal variables compared to traditional SVMs. Furthermore, the proposed HQNN classifier outperforms classical neural networks (NN) in terms of classification accuracy while utilizing a reduced number of training parameters. We have tested the performance of the HQNN model on a real IBM quantum computer. The results indicate that QML models provide a more effective and precise method for classification tasks involving the recognition of human emotions.
Emotion recognition in speech is essential for human-computer interaction. This study introduces a refined hybrid Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) framework designed to substantially enhance Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). It addresses major challenges such as speaker variability, noise robustness, and cross-domain applicability that often limit classical deep learning models. By Utilizing quantum principles like superposition and entanglement within a 6-qubit, 8-layer parameterized circuit, the model derives highdimensional, noise-resistant features from speech signals. The method includes sophisticated preprocessing steps, such as bandpass filtering and energy-based Voice Activity Detection (VAD), followed by Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) extraction. Evaluated on a diverse dataset of 4,515 samples across eight emotions (Angry, Calm, Disgust, Fear, Happy, Neutral, Sad, Surprised), the QCNN achieved an accuracy of 86 %, setting a new benchmark. It surpasses classical approaches such as a CNN with attention(77%)(77 \%)(77%), a traditional QCNN(77.87%)(77.87 \%)(77.87%), and a hybrid quantum-classical network(76%)(76 \%)(76%). The model demonstrated balanced performance, with precision scores ranging from 0.79 to 1.0 (including a perfect 1.0 for Fear) and recall scores from 0.82 to 0.94. These results underscore the promise of quantum-enhanced neural networks in capturing complex, nonlinear speech emotion patterns and establishing a new standard for robust, generalizable SER systems.
Quantum machine learning (QML) offers a promising avenue for advancing representation learning in complex signal domains. In this study, we investigate the use of parameterised quantum circuits (PQCs) for speech emotion recognition (SER)-a challenging task due to the subtle temporal variations and overlapping affective states in vocal signals. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical architecture that integrates PQCs into a conventional convolutional neural network (CNN), leveraging quantum properties such as superposition and entanglement to enrich emotional feature representations. Experimental evaluations on three benchmark datasets IEMOCAP, RECOLA, and MSP-IMPROV-demonstrate that our hybrid model achieves improved classification performance relative to a purely classical CNN baseline, with over 50% reduction in trainable parameters. Furthermore, Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) analysis demonstrates that the quantum model yields feature representations with improved alignment to true emotion classes compared with the classical model, reinforcing the observed performance gains. This work provides early evidence of the potential for QML to enhance emotion recognition and lays the foundation for future quantum-enabled affective computing systems.
Emotion recognition seeks to identify a person’s state by examining signals such as facial expressions, speech, physiological signals and conversational content. Yet accurate emotion recognition presents obstacles because these signals can be complex, noisy, nonlinear and heavily affected by surrounding context. This paper investigates quantum-based representations combined with machine learning techniques to enhance emotion classification. The research examines emotion sources, including facial expressions, speech, EEG signals and conversational data. It explores how quantum-inspired techniques can merge with established deep learning methods to produce representations. The design presented fuses a neural network with a four qubit ZZFeatureMap component enabling the system to learn data from both conventional and quantum derived feature spaces. Experiments examined EEG segments for each participant and the system achieved average recognition rates of seventy nine point six percent for valence and eighty one point five percent for arousal across ten repeated trials. These findings show that quantum derived features can add information when combined with conventional deep learning methods. Nevertheless because experiments used simulated circuits the results do not prove a performance advantage over conventional techniques on actual quantum computers. The study also highlights difficulties such as quantum noise, computational scalability, experimental assessment, data privacy and real world deployment.
Speech emotion recognition (SER) remains fragile in real-world conditions because emotional cues are subtle, speaker-dependent, and easily confounded by recording variability, while high-performing deep models typically rely on large and carefully curated training sets. Quantum machine learning offers an alternative way to introduce nonlinear correlation modeling with compact modules, yet existing quantum SER studies remain limited, and the impact of circuit structure is not well understood. This paper presents HQTN-SER, a hybrid quantum-classical framework that investigates how quantum tensor network connectivity can support SER under small-qubit settings. HQTN-SER introduces (i) an MPS-inspired quantum tensor network module that enforces structured interactions to model correlations in speech representations with a small number of trainable parameters, and (ii) a fusion strategy that combines quantum measurement features with a learned classical latent embedding for end-to-end emotion classification. We evaluate HQTN-SER on three public benchmarks (RAVDESS, SAVEE, and MDER) under a unified preprocessing and training protocol. The proposed model achieves test accuracies of 80.09\% on RAVDESS, 78.12\% on SAVEE, and 73.51\% on MDER, with corresponding macro-F1 scores of 0.8012, 0.7826, and 0.7351, respectively. The model also exhibits stable convergence while using only three or four qubits, suggesting that MPS-inspired circuit structure can be an effective and hardware-aware design choice for quantum-assisted SER. These results provide a compact experimental baseline for studying structured quantum modules in affective computing.
Speech emotion recognition (SER) has gained utmost attention among researchers for its vital role in Human-Computer Interaction, enabling systems to understand and respond to the emotional states of the users. In this work, the concept of transfer learning has been extended to the novel domain of hybrid classical-quantum neural networks for enhancing SER performance. The classical part involves preprocessing raw speech signals to generate three-channel log mel-spectrograms and the pretrained VGG 19 network for extracting useful emotional features. The quantum part is built upon a dressed quantum neural network (QNN), comprising multiple parallel QNN blocks, for accurate emotion classification. Extensive experiments on the publicly accessible TESS dataset reveal that the proposed hybrid transfer learning approach achieves state of the art accuracy of 98.93 %. An ablation study demonstrates the significant performance improvement attributed to the incorporation of QNN blocks. The integration of classical and quantum neural networks provides a robust and efficient solution, leveraging the strengths of both computational paradigms to enhance SER based applications.