The Wall Street Journal reports Apple has confirmed it has made an acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Emotient. The cloud-based technology developed by Emotient uses artificial intelligence to detect emotion by analyzing facial expressions.
An Apple spokeswoman confirmed the purchase with the company’s standard statement after an acquisition, saying Apple “buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” She declined to elaborate on the deal terms.
The company’s website is still live following the news and describes the tech as ‘the leader in emotion detection and sentiment analysis based on facial expressions. The company is at the vanguard of a new wave of emotion analysis that will lead to a quantum leap in customer understanding and emotion-aware computing.”
Some of the specific applications the company has been using the tech for, according to its website, include “measurement of a customer’s unfiltered emotional response to ads, content, products and customer service or sales interactions.”
While it’s possible the acquisition could have been to acquire talent and or the technology itself, financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, and Apple as usual didn’t offer any information regarding its plans for Emotient following the purchase.
And today’s news also adds to a running list of AI-related technology buys for Apple in recent months. Back in October Apple acquired another artificial intelligence technology from startup Perceptio, a solution for running AI tech on smartphones with less reliance on the cloud, while that same month it confirmed a purchase of virtual assistant maker VocallQ.
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Touch ID on it’s way out… Face ID on it’s way in…
No apostrophes in “its” – time to patch that keyboard…
Actually he’s right, “it’s” the the contraction of “it is”, whereas the “its” you mention is used in the possessive form. The cat was grumpy because its catnip was missing.
Might just be to acquire the patent – could be as cheap as licensing it and definitely more profitable if used defensively or offensively in the future.
I doubt TouchId is on the way out; I think that this will be more for interactions with Siri to better assess if the answer met your needs or not. Frown and Siri will try a different approach to answering the question!
Link that with the recent acquisition of the company doing realtime facial image creation, and Siri can have emotional visual queues to you when she doesn’t understand what you said.
Putting visual emotional interactions into Siri will be a BIG DEAL!
Found the other acquisition: FaceShift (http://viptest.9to5mac.com/2015/09/04/apple-faceshift/)