Quantum AI in Speech Emotion Recognition.

We evaluate a hybrid quantum-classical pipeline for speech emotion recognition (SER) on a custom Afrikaans corpus using MFCC-based spectral features with pitch and energy variants, explicitly comparing three quantum approaches-a variational quantum classifier (VQC), a quantum support vector machine (QSVM), and a Quantum Approximate Optimisation Algorithm (QAOA)-based classifier-against a CNN-LSTM (CLSTM) baseline. We detail the classical-to-quantum data encoding (angle embedding with bounded rotations and an explicit feature-to-qubit map) and report test accuracy, weighted precision, recall, and F1. Under ideal analytic simulation, the quantum models reach 41-43% test accuracy; under a realistic 1% NISQ noise model (100-1000 shots) this degrades to 34-40%, versus 73.9% for the CLSTM baseline. Despite the markedly lower empirical accuracy-expected in the NISQ era-we provide an end-to-end, noise-aware hybrid SER benchmark and discuss the asymptotic advantages of quantum subroutines (Chebyshev-based quantum singular value transformation, quantum walks, and block encoding) that become relevant only in the fault-tolerant regime.