Can Your Phone Tell How You’re Feeling by How Your Voice Sounds?

Do you ever feel like you’re not sure how you feel? Do you wish a robot could tell you how you’re feeling? Well, you’re in luck, one group of developers is claiming to have an app that listens to your voice and tells you how you’re feeling. 

The app is called Moodies, and the idea goes like this: you talk to your phone, and it uses a few key variables to sense how you might be feeling: things like pitch, volume, pauses, timing and energy. From that, the app guesses how you’re feeling, and tells you. According to the screen shots on the iTunes store you may be feeling “introversion and shyness,” or “sad and seeking companions,” or “strong ambition, drive to succeed, joy.”  Beyond Verbal—the company behind the app—claims that this is the “world’s first emotions analytics app for iOS.” 

Moodies could be perfect for those who don’t know how they’re feeling at a particular time, and need a computer to tell them. But experts are suspicious that the app can even actually do that. "We simply don't have the technology today, at the level of cognitive neuroscience, to really know the precise content of a person's thought or emotion," Andrew Baron, a researcher at the University of British Columbia told the Wall Street Journal. 

So it might not quite be time to give up on trying to understand your own emotions, and outsource that time consuming, depressing hobby to a robot. 

Rose Eveleth | | READ MORE

Rose Eveleth was a writer for Smart News and a producer/designer/ science writer/ animator based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, Story Collider, TED-Ed and OnEarth.