Amazon.com is developing a voice-activated wearable device that can recognize human emotions. We can sense based on how the person wearing it is feeling and react accordingly if a person is going to suffer a heart attack and can warn the wearer to reach the closest hospital.
The wrist-worn gadget is described as a health and wellness product in internal documents. It’s a collaboration between Lab126, the hardware development group behind Amazon’s Fire phone and Echo smart speaker and the Alexa voice software team. It could be an improvement in the feature found in Apple Watch.
According to Bloomberg sources “The wearable device is designed to work with a smartphone app and device has microphones paired with software that can discern the wearer’s emotional state from the sound of his or her voice, according to the documents and a person familiar with the program. Eventually, the technology could be able to advise the wearer how to interact more effectively with others. 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.
The constraint that Amazon faces is that it does not have a 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 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.
It’s unclear whether Amazon has plans to bring the device to the mass market. USA TODAY reached out to Amazon for comment about the new device.
Amazon is said to be working on a home robot called “Vesta,” which is reportedly a movable machine version of Alexa. And the company is working on Alexa-powered earphones designed to compete with Apple Air Pods.