Mining Your Voice for Hidden Feelings and Company Profits
Note to Self
WNYC Studios
4.7 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2014
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There is a perfect tone of voice according to Dan Emodi. And he believes his technology can pinpoint it for you.
This is the second of two episodes about technology that dissects our voices, pulls them apart, and analyzes them digitally to understand our emotions.
Hear how Emodi's company, called Beyond Verbal, is applying 20 years of "emotion analytics" to help us understand ourselves better. These products claim to be able to determine true emotions just from listening to you speak for 20 seconds. It could also determine if a salesperson is using the "perfect sales intonation" or if a given customer calling up is 'exasperated and furious' or 'exasperated and ready to listen'.
Market research and call centers may be the early testing ground of emotion detection software, but the applications could end up working as a wellness tool or even a dating aide (humorously demonstrated in this video).
Listen to part 1 on tech and the human voice: mental health and medical research.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello friend, this is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Text City. |
| 0:06.9 | Same good content, just the old name. Enjoy. |
| 0:12.0 | Deanna Modi is an Israeli businessman. He's got a hot new technology and a big promise to sell. |
| 0:18.8 | But yeah, Modi makes a lot of pitches at events. And one day he was at a big conference. |
| 0:24.2 | That's where I was speaking day in and day out. |
| 0:26.2 | Back to back speeches session after session explaining his technology technology that he says delivers emotional awareness. |
| 0:34.6 | One of his products that uses it is a smartphone app called Moody's and at that conference Dan used this app on himself. |
| 0:42.2 | And during one of the afternoons I activated Moody's for I don't know how many times the app listens to your voice say while giving a speech at a podium. |
| 0:50.2 | And then it tells you what you're truly feeling. |
| 0:53.0 | And what took me by surprise it was loneliness and fatigue and anxiety and I didn't think I was that person. |
| 1:00.0 | Only then I realized how washed out I was. |
| 1:03.0 | Here he is thinking he is giving the pitch of a lifetime, but his own app tells him that he's actually an emotional wreck. |
| 1:09.8 | And this actually reflected me something that very few of us really feeling, too, |
| 1:15.8 | is the fact that when we are washed out on energetic, maybe too hostile, maybe we want to convey one message, but we are totally perceived the other way. |
| 1:24.8 | Technology that can help us understand ourselves and other humans better and sell us more stuff. |
| 1:32.8 | Exciting? Yeah. Gross? Yeah. Kind of post. |
| 1:37.7 | I'm Anusha Marodi and this is New Text City from WNYC. |
| 1:42.8 | This is the second of our two episodes about technology that dissects our voices, pulls them apart and analyzes them digitally to help us understand people's internal emotions. |
| 1:55.8 | Last week we told you the story of a young woman struggling to manage the mood swings of bipolar disorder. |
| 2:02.8 | That was medical research. Well today it's commerce. |
| 2:07.8 | Our job is to help clients solve their business problems and to deliver a business impact. |
| 2:12.8 | Jeremy Sack is a vice president at Lieberman Research Worldwide. |
... |
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