In a YouTube clip from one of Steve Jobs's last interviews, he appears to be enjoying reminiscing about how he first hit upon the idea for the keyboardless tablet that eventually became the iPad.

"I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multitouch glass display and I asked our folks, could we come up with a multitouch display that I could type on, I could rest my hands on and actually type on," Mr. Jobs says, smiling slightly as he recounts his enthusiasm at seeing the first prototype. "It was amazing."

But in a billboard superimposed over the nearly two-minute video clip, an emotion analytics company called Beyond Verbal has added its own algorithmic evaluation of Mr. Jobs's underlying feelings. It is an emotion detection system meant to parse not the meanings of people's words, but the intonations of their voices.

"Conflict between urges and self-control. Loneliness, fatigue, emotional frustration," the ticker above Mr. Jobs's head reports as he speaks. Moments later, it suggests a further diagnosis: "Insistence, stubbornness. Possibly childish egoism." And then concludes: "sadness mixed with happiness. Possibly nostalgia."

Humans generally have inklings when they utter phrases aloud that contradict their inner feelings: Thanks a lot. You've been very helpful. Wish I were there. Let's have lunch.

But now, new techniques in computational voice analysis are promising to help machines identify when smiley-sounding phrases like Mr. Jobs's belie frustration and grief within. Although the software is still in its early phases, developers like Beyond Verbal, a start-up in Tel Aviv, are offering the nascent technology as a deeper approach for call centers and other customer services that seek to read and respond to consumers' emotions in real time. The company says its software can detect 400 variations of different moods.

"It's not what you say. It's how you say it," says Dan Emodi of Beyond Verbal.

The more invasive audio mining also has the potential to unnerve some consumers, who might squirm at the idea of an unknown operator getting an instant entree into their psyche. "It's a potential privacy issue, capturing a consumer, mining that conversation," says Donna Fluss, the president of DMG Consulting, a market research firm focused on the call center industry. "What are they doing with that information?" Another question is whether emotion detection is any more valid than novelties like handwriting analysis. After all, only Steve Jobs could say how he really felt during that interview.

"It seems to me that the biggest risk of this technology is not that it violates people's privacy, but that companies might believe in it and use it to make judgments about customers or potential employees," says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "That could end up being used to make arbitrary and potentially discriminatory decisions."

Executives say a few companies are working on call-center applications for the software and they expect the first of those apps to be ready for use around the end of this year.

Yuval Mor, the chief executive of Beyond Verbal, says the program can also pinpoint and influence how consumers make decisions. He calls it deciphering "the human emotional genome."

"If this person is an innovator, you want to offer the latest and greatest product," Mr. Mor says. "If this person is a more conservative person, you don't want to offer the latest and greatest, but something tried and true."

But people's voices change over time and depending on different situations, says Professor Loewenstein. So categorizing a consumer based on one phone call could be commercially irrelevant over the long-term.

"They are just reading your voice at one moment in time. You are not going to read someone's personality from their voice," Professor Loewenstein says. "In my view, we are very far from that being a reality."

Even without a mood detection algorithm, you can classify that emotion: skepticism.

The New York Times

(China Daily 10/27/2013 page10)