Apple has acquired Emotient, an artificial-intelligence development company, The Wall Street Journal reports. Emotient has been working on solutions that use artificial intelligence to read people’s emotions by analyzing facial expressions, a technology that has up until now been primarily targeted at advertisers to gauge viewer reactions. While it’s unclear what Apple might do with this acquisition, many Silicon Valley companies have recently been working to improve image recognition, and investing heavily in AI techniques. An Apple spokesperson confirmed the purchase but gave the standard boilerplate statement that Apple always makes after an acquisition, that Apple “buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
Jesse Hollington
Jesse Hollington was a Senior Editor at iLounge. He's written about Apple technology for nearly a decade and had been covering the industry since the early days of iLounge. In his role at iLounge, he provided daily news coverage, wrote and edited features and reviews, and was responsible for the overall quality of the site's content.