Apple Acquires A.I. Startup Which Can Read People’s Emotions

Young woman making sixteen different facial expressions. High resolution image. All the pictures was taken with a medium format Hasselblad Camera system and developed from Raw.

Tech giants Apple have acquired Emotient, a San Diego-based start-up which uses artificial intelligence software to analyse facial expressions that can be used by advertisers to assess viewer reactions.

On its website, Emotient is described as “the leader in emotion detection and sentiment analysis, part of a neuromarketing wave that is driving a quantum leap in customer understanding. Our services quantify emotional response, leading to insights and actions that improves your products and how you market them.”

In May 2015, Emotient announced that a team of people, found through a crowdsourcing website, were used to train its machine-learning system by collecting and labeling the emotions of 100,000 facial images a day.

Here’s a demonstration video from the website:

This exercise was to teach the computers to better recognise different expressions. Blog posts on Emotient’s website, which have since been removed following Apple’s acquisition, described how the team “harvests faces” to create “emotion-aware machines”.

The financial agreement of the deal has not been made public. An Apple spokesperson who confirmed the acquisition with The Wall Street Journal said that Apple “buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans”.




Please login with linkedin to comment

cigarettes daily express einsights Luke Starr

Latest News

Sydney Comedy Festival: Taking The City & Social Media By Storm
  • Media

Sydney Comedy Festival: Taking The City & Social Media By Storm

Sydney Comedy Festival 2024 is live and ready to rumble, showing the best of international and homegrown talent at a host of venues around town. As usual, it’s hot on the heels of its big sister, the giant that is the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, picking up some acts as they continue on their own […]

Global Marketers Descend For AANA’s RESET For Growth
  • Advertising

Global Marketers Descend For AANA’s RESET For Growth

The Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) has announced the final epic lineup of local and global marketing powerhouses for RESET for Growth 2024. Lead image: Josh Faulks, chief executive officer, AANA  Back in 2000, a woman with no business experience opened her first juice bar in Adelaide. The idea was brilliantly simple: make healthy […]