Thanks to Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant’s popularity and its online shopping hub, the company probably already knows a lot about you, including your online shopping lists, the music you’re listening to, your address, and more.
But Amazon may soon discern your emotional state as well. According to a new Bloomberg report, the online retail giant is working on a new wrist-worn gadget that can recognize human emotions.
How far Amazon is in developing this new Alexa-powered surveillance frontier is unclear. Bloomberg reported that it “includes hardware prototype, software that detects emotions or both.”
A beta test is reportedly underway, although it is vague as to whether this is related to the hardware, the software that would detect emotions or both. Ultimately, this could simply prove to be an experiment and might never appear on Amazon’s storefront.
This is definitely one of those things that weren’t done yet because of how difficult it is to do. Today’s report concludes by saying how far Amazon’s project is or whether it will result in any kind of commercial product is not immediately obvious. So probably, for now, we should keep our emotions in check.
Amazon said it doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation when contacted by Business Insider.
Amazon would probably have to collect a large trove of data to create a device that uses voice to understand the emotional state of a user.