According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Apple has acquired Emotient, an artificial intelligence startup. The company confirmed the move to the WSJ.
The San Diego-based company was founded in 2012 and has raised $8M from investors like Intel Capital and Seth Neiman, and had been tinkering around with products like Google Glass and other wearables. Most recently the company was working with advertisers on how to bake in reaction analysis into their advertising according to the WSJ.
Here’s how the company describes itself on its site:
Emotient is the leader in emotion detection and sentiment analysis based on facial expressions. The company is at the vanguard of a new wave of emotion analysis that will lead to a quantum leap in customer understanding and emotion-aware computing. Emotient’s cloud-based services deliver direct measurement of a customer’s unfiltered emotional response to ads, content, products and customer service or sales interactions. Emotient delivers this value quickly, affordably, and at scale.
Across multiple industries, Fortune 500 companies and their market research partners are ideally suited to leverage emotion insights derived from facial expression analysis. The insights gained from Emotient give businesses the ability to make better decisions and accelerate their revenue growth.
AI is hot hot hot with Google and Facebook starting to show off what they’ve been cooking in their respective research labs.
We’ve reached out to Apple and Emotient for comment and will update if we hear back.
UPDATE: Apple provided us with the following statement:
Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.