Apple buys mood sniffer AI firm Emotient. Stop rolling your eyes at me, user Apple has acquired Emotient, a startup whose technology automates the analysis of facial expressions to measure the reaction of groups, and individuals, to events. Apple has not revealed the terms or the reason behind the acquisition, but Emotient has a patent portfolio enabling its technology to mine several different media …
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"...and also medical situations in which expression in response to particular stimulus constitutes a symptom-aiding diagnosis." /me smiles
and then
"This is the currency of revenue growth and customer satisfaction, because emotions drive spending." /me frowns
Raise my hopes for an altruistic motive. And then piss all over them.
Well... the second one explains the first one which results in profit. This is a bit scary when you think about it. Your camera or maybe CCTV in a shop will direct the sales types to your side and know exactly how to get you to make that purchase. I can see that certain political types would like this too... tailor the speech to the audience on the fly with better results than they get now.
I'm surprised that "improving the user experience" wasn't tossed in somewhere to justify this bit of snooping privacy invasion.
I don't want my phone (or my TV, since I think that's what this purchase would be really targeted towards) looking at me for my reactions to what I'm doing. At least not if it is being fed back to Facebook, to HBO, etc. depending on what I was doing/watching. Even if it is just Apple collecting the info, I would ask why the heck they need it and what they could possibly do with it that would benefit me.
Way down the road, it could be useful for Siri to be more conversational - pick up the facial cues that encode a lot of meaning in a conversation. But we're years away from Siri or any other AI "assistant" reaches the point where there is no more meaning to be extracted from words and it needs to see your face.
There is already systems that can analyse CCTV for movement and behavioural patterns associated with shoplifters, also can be used for potential suicide risk (train stations) etc.
Of course the problem is the false positives as behaviour isn't totally consistent, also once people are aware of these types of systems they can be fooled,e.g. Some grit in your shoes can change your gait enough to cause problems for gait analysis
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