MIT's Jerk-O-Meter
Another week, another wacky invention from
the much loved MIT media lab. Its recent highlights have been the Bluetooth
Squirrel and the Mobile Phone Surveillance system, both of which are well on
the way to giving the institute a reputation for high tech crack-pot inventions.
Not helping to dispel this image is the Jerk-O-Meter which is a system that
measures the stress levels in your voice to gauge your mood. One conceptual
application of this technology is in a mobile phone conversation that could let
you know if you’re getting worked up after the call, although presumably you
would have a pretty good idea of that yourself. A better idea is its potential
application to marketing schemes to see how they affect people, grab
attention and so on. Just think how we could have been spared the Crazy Frog era by
simply installing a mechanism into the TV that could translate your long string
of expletives into a language that marketing types understand. Although other
speech and mood detection software has been tested before, this new method from
MIT is more capable of more specific analysis than previous products have
achieved.
via CNET
