Apple buys a startup working on analyzing user feelings and emotions

The first acquisition for the “apple” corporation in the new year was a small American company Emotient, based in San Diego and engaged in developments in the field of artificial intelligence. According to the official position of Emotient, their technology allows you to analyze the reaction of the target audience to certain products, services or marketing activities. The amount of the transaction is not reported.

The Emotient project uses face recognition technology to analyze human emotions and converts the information into quantitative data, thereby allowing the customer to evaluate the reaction of the customer to marketing elements (for example, advertising materials). Thanks to this, companies can get more accurate data compared to using focus groups. If you describe the principle of operation of the technology in more detail, the Emotient project uses software based on artificial intelligence for a detailed analysis of the emotions reflected on each person’s face on a separate video frame, followed by breaking down the expressed feelings into microelements and measuring data by three indicators: did the person pay attention to advertising , did advertising on the emotional level influence it, and what emotions did it cause - positive or negative?

In September last year, Emotient patented a technology that allows you to “erase” the individuality on faces before they are subjected to emotional analysis. For this, “complex pixelization of individual features” is used. Thus, the company takes care of the privacy of user data, as well as protects itself from allegations of privacy breaches. According to the author of this patent and co-founder of the company, the goal of the project is to provide users with the opportunity to anonymously express their feelings about certain content without making any effort.
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It should be noted that this is not the first time Apple has shown an interest in developments in the field of analysis and recognition of human faces. So, in January 2014, the corporation filed an application for patent registration for a technology that determines the user's mood, and on the basis of the obtained data selects the appropriate content for it.