Amazon is developing a wearable device that reads your emotion from 'voice'

by RobinHiggins

It was discovered from internal documents that Amazon's R & D organization Lab126, which has brought Kindle and Amazon Echo into the world, is developing a wearable terminal that reads emotions from the user's voice.

Amazon Is Working on a Device That Can Read Human Emotions-Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/amazon-is-working-on-a-wearable-device-that-reads-human-emotions

Amazon making wearable tech to read human emotions, report says-Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-wearable-tech-detects-human-emotions-report-2019-5

Amazon preparing a wearable that 'reads human emotions,' says report-The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/5/23/18636839/amazon-wearable-emotions-report

Matt Day of Bloomberg reports on Amazon's latest wearables. When Day talked from a source and asked about the company documents of Amazon, Alexa's voice software development team and a research and development facility called 'Lab 126' cooperated to start a certain terminal development understood. The device is linked to a smartphone, and is equipped with a microchip that reads and determines emotions from the user's voice. The document states that the new technology will eventually allow the device to advise the user on how to effectively interact with others.

Lab126, a developer of wearable devices, has developed the e-book reader 'Kindle' and the Amazon's first smartphone 'Fire Phone' and the AI speaker 'Amazon Echo' equipped with Alexa.

'Amazon smartphone' to be announced soon and its own research and development organization 'Lab 126'-GIGAZINE

In 2018, it was also reported that Lab 126 was developing a home robot.

Amazon is developing a home robot, is it a moving Alexa terminal-GIGAZINE

At the time of writing, it is unclear how far Amazon's emotion reading technology development project has progressed and whether it will actually be used commercially. Bloomberg also suggests that the new technology could allow Amazon to obtain information for healthcare product development and to better target advertising. As of 2017, Amazon has already patented a smart speaker that recommends camming drop depending on the tone of the voice, and it will be able to perform such targeting more accurately.

Amazon is trying to build an ecosystem of Alexa-enabled devices, and it is believed that the ability to read emotions from voice can open up new possibilities for voice assistants.

On the other hand, although research has been conducted to read information contained in human voices, the development of a technology to accurately read human emotions with a computer is still considered to pose major challenges.