Beyond Verbal launches, closes funding round to decode human emotions from voice data
Israeli software developer, Beyond Verbal has launched a patented technology that it says can extract, decode and measure a full spectrum of human emotions from a person’s raw voice.
The company has also just closed a US$2.8 million round of funding led by Kenges Rakishev as well as a new VC, Genesis Angels. Following the investment round, Rakishev has joined Beyond Verbal’s Board of Directors.
Built on 18 years of research by physicists and neuropsychologists, studying more than 60,000 test subjects in 26 languages, the company is particularly excited about its technology.
“Nearly two decades of research tells us that it’s not what someone says, but how they say it, that tells the full story,” Yuval Mor, CEO, Beyond Verbal said. “Beyond Verbal has the potential to impact numerous multi-billion dollar verticals and leverage a new market of emotionally-enhanced applications installed in any voice-enabled, voice-activated or voice-controlled device. This opens up a new dimension of emotional understanding, called Emotions Analytics, giving humans and machines the ability to react in ways that were never before possible.”
According to the company, Beyond Verbal licenses its technology, which holds four U.S. patents for partnerships in the fields of consumer devices, appliances and software. The first third-party mobile app using its API is set to launch in the coming weeks, while the company is preparing to launch a web tool where people can use the platform to analyze voices.
Though this is not necessarily a biometric identification technology, it certainly represents an interesting branch of the discipline, and could be a powerful tool for law enforcement, or for example, to customize driving conditions for an angered driver.
Emotional recognition is also gaining traction amongst advertisers and marketers keen to get a better sense of how their ads are perceived. Reported previously in BiometricUpdate.com, GfK has recently integrated its own emotion recognition technology, EMO Scan, into its existing ad testing system. In this case, Gfk’s system relies on face detection to read emotions.
The combination of a facial system like the EMO Scan, along with a voice-based system like Beyond Verbal’s could prove to be an interesting integration and it would also be interesting to see how their results compare on the same sample.
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