Apple buys company that has created ‘emotion detection’ technologyMumbai, Jan 13(AZINS) As reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, Apple has acquired Emotient--a startup that has built an artificial intelligence based system that is able to visually recognize emotions in human faces.

With personal technology products becoming more ubiquitous in the manner they are used, companies have been grappling with ways to make devices better at figuring out our intentions. From services like Google Now that is aimed at delivering relevant information before you even ask for it to speech recognition capabilities of the likes of Siri and Google’s own speech recognition, devices are getting smarter at interacting with us.

Emotient’s system, descriptively called ‘automated facial expression recognition’, is able to recognize seven distinct facial expressions including joy, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, disgust, and contempt. The system is also capable enough to do so amidst visually noisy environments and in real time; it could for example be deployed in environments like supermarkets to help brands and marketers better understand how consumers react to products and offers.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg: this capability (part of a growing field known as “affective computing”) can be used to drive many other real-world computing applications like more effective medical diagnoses of patients, or smartphones that are able to make better suggestions on what dinner to order based on how you react to a restaurant search list.

While these developments speak volumes about the advancing field of AI, it does throw up ethically-based questions; with embedded systems being able to innocuously monitor people’s responses even without their explicit knowledge or permission, how does this play into an individual’s privacy? Will this lead to AI systems becoming increasingly able to recognize human expressions more effectively than humans themselves can?

As these questions get answered, it seems that Apple may be one of the first with devices that are more adept at understanding us and the world around them.