What a smile really is goes far beyond just a mask. While deep learning programs have been trained to discern between spontaneous and forced smiles before, the technology has now been improved to take even more specific aspects of a smile into its robo-mind before coming up with a conclusion. “We have developed a new technique for identifying the smile phases, which is robust against the noise and allows for continuous analysis of facial videos,” the scientists said in a study recently published in PLOS ONE. Smiles aren’t just universal symbols of happiness like the iconic yellow emoji. Someone can easily sucker you into believing them with an artificial smile. No matter how much chemical sweetener they put into it, there are ways to tell whether or not you’re looking at a fake. FACS ditches the anatomical and emotional aspects of a smile and sees the face only through the eyes of an observer. Meaning, any facial structures that are beyond the subject’s control and may influence a certain mouth position (like the infamous RBF) are out, and so are emotional factors that may influence how a smile comes across.