Tel-Aviv-based company Beyond Verbal is announcing a new app called Moodies, which utilizes “18 years of research by physicists and neuropsychologists” to analyze your voice for various emotional states. Once it knows how you’re feeling (it takes about 20 seconds), it produces a moody little cartoon and a description of your emotions, which you can then share with friends on Facebook and Twitter.
But this technology has potential far beyond just taking our emotional temperature. According to company CEO Yuval Mor, “We envision Moodies as a front-runner to a new breed of emotionally-aware apps … As the industry continues to evolve, we believe it’s only a matter of time until we start seeing this sort of technology being integrated into a myriad of consumer and B2B product and service applications.”
Because it has the ability to evaluate someone else’s voice as well as your own, apps like Moodies are already being used in some large call centers, and have broad potential to act as a kind of lie detector test in security settings, job interviews, or even tearful political apologies.
