Michal Marek Apple continues to acquire smaller technology companies in 2016, and this time it takes a company under its wing emotient, which uses artificial intelligence to determine people's moods by analyzing their facial expressions. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Until now, the Emotient company's technology has been used, for example, by advertising agencies, which thanks to it could evaluate the reaction of the audience, or merchants, who in a similar way analyzed the reactions of customers to specific shelves with goods. But the technology also found its application in the healthcare sector, where thanks to it, doctors monitored the occurrence of pain in patients who were unable to express it verbally.
It is not yet clear how this company's technology will be used in Cupertino. As always, Apple commented on the acquisition with a general statement: "We occasionally buy smaller technology companies and generally do not comment on the purpose of the acquisition or our future plans."
In any case, it is evident that the field of artificial intelligence and machine image recognition is really "hot" in Silicon Valley. Similar technology is rapidly being developed by all large companies with an IT focus, including Facebook, Microsoft and Google. In addition, Apple itself has previously acquired companies working on this technology. The last time it was about startups Faceshift a Perceptio.
However, the growing interest in so-called "face recognition" does not mean that computer face recognition is without controversy. Facebook has not launched its Moments app in Europe due to regulatory concerns, and rival Google's Photos app also only offers facial recognition in the United States.
