[orbital-decay]

Emotions convey a ton of meaning in human communications, not necessarily an illusion of friendship. It's a huge side channel and there's a clear use case for an assistant to not sound lifeless and robotic. Scams, addictions, privacy loss and many other things deviating from the idealistic sci-fi portrayals will stay regardless of the tech if not treated on the cultural level (which is way harder to do and nobody likes doing it, preferring to shift the responsibility onto someone else).

[nmstoker]

Can't say I've missed emotions in Google Search or Excel. In chat from something designed to help you, there's a fairly narrow range of emotional cases that are relevant and useful:

- Confidence/confusion: if the bot thinks it misheard or cannot understand you or it lacks confidence in the ability to reliably respond then it's a handy channel

- Dangerous/Seriousness: an update for something genuinely serious, with major negative implications or costs

Most others are fairly annoying (would anyone want a bot to surface frustration or obsequiousness or being overly agreeable / "bubbly" as here?!)