Hey y’all, it’s Austin. As the pandemic drags on, I’ll admit that I’m grumpier than ever. Between being stuck inside a small New York City apartment all day and mostly only communicating with outsiders online, I wouldn’t be surprised if my friends, family and coworkers can sense my restlessness and frustration in our every Zoom call. Thankfully, though, there’s now a technological solution to my becoming the mayor of frown town: Amazon Halo, a wearable device designed to analyze voice tones in order to detect user emotions.
Last week, the e-commerce behemoth introduced its new fitness tracker. It will do physical health monitoring, which has become big business in recent years with rise of the Apple Watch, the Oura Ring and Fitbit Inc., which Alphabet Inc. has agreed to buy. But Halo has also jumped on a newer trend: Emotional health monitoring. Amazon's announcement that Halo would measure wearers’ moods came the same week that Fitbit said it would measure stress levels. Emotional analysis is fast attracting big investment, with machines now being trained to study human personality traits, compassion levels and facial expressions.
