A team from San Francisco have created an app that listens to a user's voice and analysis his/her emotions in real-time. The app, called "Emotion Journal," also records the user's voice, stores it and colour-codes the logs over time so that users can track their recent emotions as well as those from the past at a glance.
The brain behind the app, Andrew Greenstein, an app developer from San Francisco, started keeping a journal a few months ago as an effective stress buster and because it helped him in setting goals. He tried to make it a habit to write for five minutes every day. However, he found that challenging since his work as a developer keeps him busy.
Greenstein, the CEO of SF AppWorks (a digital agency), and his co-founder, Darius Zagrean, have shown interested in using artificial intelligence to address mental health issues.
"I'd like to continue working on it because this stuff to me, the connection between human and computer, is so fascinating," Greenstein said.
The idea of developing the "Emotional Journal" came to Greenstein and his team during an internal AppWorks hackathon when they came across a team developing an app that creates anxiety-inducing situations for users and then helps users improve their response to the anxiety triggers. Greenstein noted that his team wants to get as much into AI as possible because that is where the world is going.
At the Disrupt London Hackathon, Greenstein and his team explored the link between AI and emotions and successfully built The Emotion Journal which performs real-time emotional analysis to detect a user's feelings and chart their emotional state over time.
The team was awarded over £4,000 for the app, according to Tech Crunch.