Amazon's Alexa wants to learn more about your feelings

Amazon's Alexa team is beginning to analyze the sound of users' voices to recognize their mood or emotional state, Alexa chief scientist Rohit Prasad told VentureBeat. Doing so could let Amazon personalize and improve customer experiences, lead to lengthier conversations with the AI assistant, and even open the door to Alexa one day responding to queries based on your emotional state or scanning voice recordings to diagnose disease. Tell Alexa that you're happy or sad today and she can deliver a pre-programmed response. In the future, Alexa may be able to pick up your mood without being told. The voice analysis effort will begin by teaching Alexa to recognize when a user is frustrated.