Moodies For iPhone Analyzes Mood & Emotions From Your Voice
We all know how small a role actual ‘words’ play when communicating vocally with other people. Non-verbal cues encapsulated by body language and the exact tone of your voice matter a whole lot more! However, this is what we know as humans, since this feature come built-in with essentially all of us. What if computers could analyse our mood by our voice?
Developed by Beyond Verbal, a company centered around developing software for emotion analysis based on raw voice input, ‘Moodies’ is a new iOS app that claims to detect your mood just by how you speak, and that too in under 20 seconds! Moodies depends on Beyond Verbal’s own patented cloud-based emotion analysis engine to do all the hard work; the app itself acts as a conduit of sorts.
To test the app out properly, I let it analyze two different monologues from two different movies.
The first is when Tom Cruise breaks down and starts angrily shouting in a drunken state after realizing he can’t win the court case in ‘A Few Good Men’. Moodies detected that his character had feelings of dominance and superiority, of disliking others and being highly judgemental.
For the second case, I let it listen to Morgan Freeman’s monologue at around the end of ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, in which he discusses how the main character escapes Shawshank Prison and traps its corrupt warden. Moodie said Freeman’s character is lonely, feels helpless, and remorseful.
Moodies comes with two different modes. The single-time ‘Quick Analysis’ option can be invoked by tapping the red ‘listen’ button, and then there’s the ‘Continuous Analysis’ for continually assessing a person’s mood as they keep on speaking. Moodies shows you a self-explanatory ‘Primary Mood’, alongside a ‘Secondary Mood’ for a less expressed but still detected mood. All recorded moods are stored in the Vault so you can see your history with the app. You can share your Moodies result on Facebook, Twitter, and via email.
While not 100% accurate (Cruise’s character was feeling inferior in the situation, not superior), it correctly detected Freeman’s character’s mood. Freeman’s character himself says that Shawshank Prison felt empty without the main character i.e. he felt lonely.
For Beyond Verbal, Moodies is a proof-of-concept to show potential clients how well they’re doing with emotion analysis. For the rest of us, it is an entertaining but not entirely useful free app to play around with.
Be sure to let us know what you think of Moodies by leaving a comment in the comments section below.
Install Moodies from App Store
