Apple buys AI startup Emotient

An Apple spokeswoman confirmed the purchase with the company’s standard statement after an acquisition, saying Apple “buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” She declined to elaborate on the deal terms.

Emotient, based in San Diego, had previously raised $8 million from investors including Intel Capital. The company this week revised its website and removed details about the services it had been selling.

Apple has expressed interest in the field. In a 2014 patent application, it described a software system that would analyse and identify people’s moods based on a variety of clues, including facial expression.

In October, Apple confirmed that it had acquired another artificial-intelligence startup, VocalIQ Ltd., that aims to improve a computer’s ability to understand natural speech. Faceshift, a motion capture startup focused on facial analysis, as well as Perceptio, a company with deep-learning image recognition technology designed for mobile processors, are now also under Apple's umbrella.

In May, Emotient announced that it had been granted a patent for a method of collecting and labeling as many as 100,000 facial images a day so computers can better recognise different expressions.

Its technology leaves some skittish, including Paul Ekman, a psychologist who pioneered the study of reading faces to determine emotions and is an adviser to Emotient. In the 1970s, he created a catalog of more than 5,000 muscle movements to show how even the subtlest facial tics could reveal a person’s emotions. Dubbed the Facial Action Coding System, it is the foundation for several startups trying to read emotions using artificial-intelligence algorithms.

Among more-established companies, Google in 2012 published a paper detailing how an artificial-intelligence program taught itself to recognise cats. The company has adapted that software to improve search results, though it has tread more carefully around facial recognition. It banned any apps for its Google Glass Web-connected eyewear that used facial recognition, for instance.

Facebook has been more aggressive, rolling out facial-recognition software across its social network that automatically recognises faces to make it easier to tag people in photos. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said this week he hopes to build a personal artificial-intelligence assistant that could recognise friends at the front door to let them in.