When we communicate with people, the words used isn’t the only important thing. What tone they’re pronounced in, and the body language matters a whole lot too. Of course, only humans are capable of recognizing the different tones; we were born with this feature. But what if computers could analyze our mood by our voice? That is what the app Moodies claims to do. It’s developed by Beyond Verbal, a company that has its main focus on creating software for emotion analysis. Moodies can detect your mood by how you speak to it, and it does it under 20 seconds as well! So how does it detect your mood? Well, Moodies uses the patented Beyond Verbal’s cloud-based emotion analysis engine. So basically, if you speak to the app in a boring way, it will detect your mood as boring and etc.
Using the app is simple, you just launch it, hit the record button and start talking. It comes with two different modes. There’s a ‘Quick Analysis’ feature, and that can be used by tapping the red ‘listen’ button. This is for a short message. For a longer message, there’s a ‘Continuous Analysis’. This option assesses the mood of the person as they keep speaking. After you have spoken, Moodies shows a ‘Primary Mood’ and a ‘Secondary Mood’. The primary mood is what the person is mainly feeling, and the secondary mood is not as expressed as the primary mood but was still be detected. Every recorded mood is stored in the Vault, so you can check your history of moods. Also, the option to share your mood via Twitter, Facebook and email is available.
The app was given a test by making it listen to Morgan Freeman’s monologue near the end of ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. Moodie detected the mood as remorseful, lonely and feels helpless. It correctly detected Freeman’s mood because the character himself says he felt empty and lonely without the main character. So this shows that the app is quite accurate with it’s detection.
Moodies is a sort of proof for Beyond Verbal that they’re doing well with emotion analysis. Potential clients might be interested by it, as for us users? It’s an entertaining but not too useful app to play around with. If they could integrate Moodies with Siri, then that’s a whole new experience. But as of now, Moodies is fun and entertaining app to kill some time with.
