Amazon is getting close to building a Alexa laptop that knows when you're depressed

It seems that Amazon is working on a new gadget based on Alexa that can listen to you, decide what you feel and make recommendations based on your human emotions. By quoting internal documents and an unnamed source, Bloomberg reports that the company has designed a device that you are wearing as a wristwatch and the beta tests are apparently underway. "In the long run, technology may be able to advise the wearer how to interact more effectively with others," reads the report.

Amazon does not know exactly where is the development of this new frontier of surveillance by Alexa. Bloomberg could not say whether the tests in question "included a prototype of hardware, an emotion detection software or both". The report says however that the device is a "wrist-mounted gadget" developed in conjunction with Lab126, the same company developing the phone Echo and the Fire (LOL). And this concerns all the information we have about the current hardware. Amazon does, however, have a number of patents to understand how such a technology might work.

One of these patents includes the image above. (We've added colors to the original design to make it more fun and more realistic.) This patent, titled "Voice Determination of the Physical and Emotional Characteristics of Users," describes how an Alexa device can receive information from people. 39 a user via microphones and label it accordingly. As illustrated by the realistic drawing above, a sick woman could arrive home, cough and say that she was hungry. Alexa would call her "sick" and then recommend the chicken soup. Alexa could even suggest ordering cough drops from Amazon to relieve human discomfort. The Alexa workflow, according to the same drawing, might look a bit like this:

This example sounds pretty innocuous, but Amazon seems to have bigger plans than cough drops for this emotion-reading technology. Another patent issued on April 30 this year describes more advanced systems for analyzing not only a user's emotions, but also their mental health status. This patent describes "a method of identifying states of human mental health with the aid of mobile device data" that would come from a "mobile device (for example a smartphone, a device portable)". The patent then explains how measurements taken from the device – everything from accelerometers and GPS data to text message logs and voice data – could be used to determine "the likelihood that one or more symptoms manifest themselves in the user. The symptoms, in this case, include those described in the DSM-V, such as those associated with depression or PTSD. Here is a part of a graph of this patent application:

The latter patent then describes how audio could also be used to determine a user's mental health and emotions. Here, technology analyzes features such as articulation, pitch variation, and vocal effort ("a measure of a feature designed to distinguish between soft and breathable voices and strong, taut voices" ) to provide more data. The application stops before including drawings of depressed humans or suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms.

The vocal aspect of this technology seems to rest, in part, on another patent of Amazon, made public last October. This one describes the process of using voice typing to determine "happiness, joy, anger, grief, sadness, fear, disgust, boredom, stress and anxiety." 39, other emotional states "at the user. This patent also mentions how the detection of "certain vocal functions, such as a cough or a sniff" could help the software to identify the user as having "a specific physical or emotional abnormality". All of these terms seem a bit cold and clinical, although you have already read a patent filing, you know it is the vernacular of these documents.

It's hard to know what Amazon really plans to do with all this technology, as hypothetical as it may seem. However, it seems that Amazon could finally use this patented technology for the development of new hardware. We also know that Amazon is becoming more and more interested in health related businesses. In June, Amazon acquired PillPack, an online provider of prescription drugs, and entrusted Nader Kabbani, a veteran of the Kindle team, with the responsibility for developing the company's pharmaceutical business at the beginning of the year. . One can only imagine how useful detailed information about the symptoms of millions and millions of Alexa users would be useful for this new activity.

It sounds scary, though, is not it? Imagine if you hooked up a new echo, Sniffle, then Alexa recommended you to buy Kleenex. It's actually a pretty quaint application for the emotion detection technology that Amazon works on. One could easily imagine a future in which Alexa devices could be used to monitor people's mental health status and possibly make mistakes. We know from countless Echo error reports that Amazon's artificially intelligent wizard is not always as smart as it is supposed to be. And we certainly know that Amazon is not as good at paying attention to the privacy of users. Perhaps more than anything, it is deeply troubling to think that technology could soon monitor our physical existence while monitoring our emotions and mental health.

However, no alarm is necessary at this time. Technology that helps us better understand ourselves, understand our emotions and our mental health is a promising idea. There is some concern that Amazon may be the first to market a gadget and software that would do a lot of harm to collect more data and sell more cough candy.

We have contacted Amazon for more information on the reports of its portable device with emotion detection and the software that underlies it. We will update this post if we receive an answer.

Update 13h: A spokesperson for Amazon replied, "We do not comment on rumors or speculation."