Amazon, Cogito and other technology companies leverage Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning and Behavioral Analytics to gauge emotions and sentiment.

Amazon cares about your feelings. The company is developing a voice-activated wearable device that can recognize human emotions. This consumer wearable device is a wrist-worn product which is described as a health and wellness product in Amazon’s internal documents. Amazon’s Lab126 hardware development group and the Alexa voice team are developing this product. Amazon is designing the device to work in conjunction with a mobile app. The device has embedded microphones that work in tandem with software that can gauge the wearer’s emotional state based on the sound of that person’s voice. Amazon has talked publicly about building a more life-like virtual assistant.

The technology could enable Amazon to capture insights for prospective health products or be leveraged for targeted advertising and product recommendations. Amazon has also been working on a domestic robot – project “Vesta” – named after the Roman goddess of the hearth, home and family. Early models can navigate through the home similar to an autonomous vehicle. We’ve observed similar autonomous robot technology in the Boston-area with autonomous “delivery” bots and “warehouse” bots.

Companies leverage AI and behavioral analytics for a variety of reasons. Consider the example of Boston-based Cogito. The company utilizes AI and behavioral analytics to power a platform that guides customer service reps through customer call interactions. One example is how Cogito’s software provides real-time alerts to customer service agents enabling them to calibrate their speaking style to each customer. This capability provides significant value in an industry such as P&C Insurance where customer acquisition costs are high and policyholders’ switching costs are low. Technology that enables the customer service agent to engage with the policyholder during a FNOL call in a manner that minimizes stress while providing the necessary information mitigates the risk of losing that policyholder.

Stay tuned, we expect to see more in the way of hybrid software/hardware solutions that incorporate conversational AI, machine learning, deep learning and behavioral analytics.  

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