Your voice reveals your subconscious

Posted 2010.04.06

I met a slightly creepy yet really interesting company yesterday. Voiceprism has a technology that analyzes sound waves generated by the human voice. This gives them the ability to listen to an individual for 10 minutes, establish a baseline voice pattern and then detect the deviations from the normal frequencies. These deviations have proven to be indicative of emotions such as excitement, stress, delight, anger, …

This reminded me of the biometrics Innerscope looks at to gauge emotional engagement. The voice could be an additional data point that can give us clues about what is happening in the subconscious. The main differentiator for this technology is its ability to listen in on thousands of phone conversations. This means it can be used at scale in a cost effective way. I haven’t seen another technology that has the potential to capture data from the subconscious for potentially thousands of consumers.

They talked to me about their work with insurance companies where they analyze claims calls and flag insurance claims that should be investigated further based on the stress levels of the callers. They were basically doing automated lie detection. This apparently helped insurance companies dramatically reduce fraud levels.

I think there could be other interesting applications, especially in quantitative research where it is often hard to quantify true emotional engagement through analyzing what people are saying. How they are saying it can now apparently give us valuable clues as well. Click here to see a video of how the technology works.