Internal documents that leaked from Amazon‘s lab have revealed the e-commerce giant has got a wearable device in the works. The device is described as a health and wellness product and is worn on the wrist but it does more than tracking physical health stats. The document reveals the wearable will be voice-activated and that it recognizes human emotions.

The gadget is said to be the brainchild of a collaboration between Lab126 and Alexa voice software team. Lab126 is the hardware development group that developed Amazon’s Fire phone and Echo smart speaker. The project goes by the code name, Dylan.

The wearable device is designed to work with a smartphone app and it has microphones that are connected to the internal software. Thus, it is able to decode the user’s emotional state from the pitch or sound of his or her voice, the documents and a source familiar with the program revealed. The document also shows that the technology will eventually be able to advise the wearer how to interact more effectively with other persons.

The project is similar to a patent filing which Amazon made in 2017 for a system where voice software uses analysis of vocal patterns to determine how a user is feeling, discerning among “joy, anger, sorrow, sadness, fear, disgust, boredom, stress, or other emotional states.” The patent was only made public last year and its description hints at the possibility of Amazon using knowledge of a user’s emotions to recommend products or to determine responses. A sketch accompanying the patent filing explains that the technology can detect an abnormal emotional condition. The sketch shows a woman telling Alexa she’s hungry, between a cough and sniffling afterwards. The digital assistant, picking up that she has a cold, asks the woman if she would like a recipe for chicken soup. A second patent granted Amazon is of a system that uses techniques to distinguish the wearer’s speech from background noises. This patent will also be integrated on the wearable.

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We don’t know the stage the project currently is or if there are plans for it to ever go commercial. We expect Amazon to include it on its first-ever wearable device which should be in the works. We must state, though, that Amazon gives its various teams the free hand to experiment with products, some of which will never come to market. However, work is said to be ongoing on this one and beta testing is presently ongoing, according to a source familiar with the matter.

(source)

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