Amazon working on wearable device that can read human emotions

The wearable device has microphones paired with software that can detect the wearer’s emotional state from the sound of his voice.
Amazon working on wearable device that can read human emotions
Amazon working on wearable device that can read human emotions
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Can artificial intelligence be deployed to read and react on human emotions? Well, Amazon thinks so and under development is a wearable device (read smartwatch) that can sense how the person wearing it is feeling based on the person’s voice and react accordingly. It could be an improvement on the feature found in Apple Watch which can sense if a person is going to suffer a heart attack and can warn the wearer to reach the closest hospital.

But there it is just the state of the wearer’s health. Here, Amazon is working on its wearable making assessment of the human being’s emotional state. Some of these emotional states can be joy, anger, sorrow, sadness, fear, disgust, boredom or stress. Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa will be the medium that will read the voice of the user and the technology now developed will be able to help it understand if the person is in one of these emotional states.

It is understood that it is still at the laboratory level, Amazon’s Lab 126 and the software team that works on Alexa is also collaborating in the work.

The constraint that Amazon faces is that it does not have smartphone of its own or an operating system like Android or iOS to test the different technologies it develops on a larger scale. Here too, the wearable device will have to be coupled with a smartphone for the various features to be fully exploited. The Alexa software and a tiny microphone attached to the wearable will be enabled to sense the voice of the wearer and conclude that he or she is going through a particular emotional state. Going ahead, the device may be developed to include certain suggestions being offered by Alexa to the user to react suitably.

Amazon already holds patents for many of these futuristic technologies; the question however is how much of these can be successfully adopted on a commercial scale and be deployed in the market. There are other technology companies too, like Google, IBM and Microsoft working on machines reading human emotions. It may be some time before these developments emerge with more muscle and clarity.

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