Tech giant Apple recently made a major acquisition after it has purchased Emotient, a startup company that uses artificial intelligence technology in order to read human emotion by analyzing specific and unique facial expressions.

Tech experts and market analysts are still puzzled as to why Apple made the acquisition. Emotient's technologies are mostly sold to advertisers in order to help them assess viewer reactions to their respective ads.

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Some medical experts have tried applying Emotient's technology into their field in order to determine signs of pain from patients who are experiencing difficulties in expressing themselves. Retail store also use the technology to monitor shoppers' facial expressions when shipping in their stores.

Image and facial recognition technologies are slowly gaining traction in some Silicon Valley companies. Apple rivals, like Facebook and Google, have already thrown large sum of investments in the research and development of artificial intelligence technologies.

In a statement acquired by the Wall Street Journal, an Apple spokesperson said that the company "buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."

According to MacRumors, Emotient describes itself as "the leader in emotion detection and sentiment analysis, part of a neuromarketing wave that is driving a quantum leap in customer understanding."

Apple has expressed its interest into the facial recognition technology in the past. In 2014, Apple applied for a patent for a technology described as a software system that can analyze and identify people's moods through their facial expression.

In October 2015, the Cupertino-based tech giant confirmed that it has acquired VocalIQ, a startup company that focuses on the use of artificial intelligent in improving a computer's ability to comprehend natural speech.

Google is among the front runners in the current drive towards artificial intelligence, especially facial recognition. Back in 2012, the search giant published a research paper detailing how its artificial intelligence program was to teach itself how to recognize cats.

On the other hand, Facebook has been aggressive over the years in rolling out features that uses facial recognition programs. The social network giant has released features on its massive network that allows computer to automatically recognize people's faces and allow users to easily tag people in photos.