Let’s say your relationship is on the rocks. You’ve been trying to work things out together in couples’ counselling, but ultimately, you want to know if it is worth the effort. Will things get better, or are they doomed to fall apart?

It might be worth just pausing for a second to listen to your partner. Really listen. When you speak to each other, your voices hold all sorts of information that could reveal the answer. Subtle inflections in tone, the pauses between phrases, the volume at which you speak – it all conveys hidden signals about how you really feel.

You might also like:

• The key to unlocking lost languages

• The musicians without ears

• What single word defines who you are?

A lot of this we pick up on intuitively. We use it to fine-tune the meaning of our words. Think of the difference between these questions:

“Why are you here?”

“Why are you here?”

“Why are you here?”

That shift in emphasis is one of the more obvious ways we layer our speech with meaning. But there are many more layers that we add without realising it.

But there is a way to extract this hidden information from our speech. Researchers have even developed artificial intelligence that can then use this information to predict the future of couples’ relationships. The AI is already more accurate at this than professionally trained therapists.