Wagging fingers and podium pounding may fool the eye, but voice patterns never lie in telling stress and mindset. Sharecare, a leading digital health and wellness engagement platform, has this capability through its award-winning voice analysis system, the fascinating technology that can tell your emotional state from fractal speech patterns. The Atlanta company is now using its superpower for public good through analysis of upcoming presidential candidate debates.
The application, which boasts 92-94% accuracy, was initially developed as a smartphone app to help people improve self-awareness, personal relationships, and well-being. Especially attuned to recognize stress levels, Sharecare is utilizing the technology to reveal candidates’ state-of-mind by evaluating audio from speeches and public battles – including tonight’s Republican debate in South Carolina.
Tomorrow on Friday, January 15, Sharecare will showcase video clips of the candidates with graphical overlays to explain the analyses by speaker and topic on www.doctoroz.com. Dr. Mehmet Oz is a Cofounder of Sharecare with WebMD Founder Jeff Arnold.
How does the behavioral voice app work? Sharecare Voice automatically monitors data from speaking, identifying fractal patterns – vocal fingerprints of a sort – that can determine the user’s mindset and stress type. It logs the information neatly into a dashboard giving an emotional overview of the user’s life, determining if speech is calm or irritated through a spectrum that goes from green, yellow, and red. One can then correlate that information to their contacts and calendar to form a better view of how they communicate at certain points in the day and with specific people.
“It tells you how you were perceived versus how you think you sound,” says Jennifer Martin Hall, Vice President of Communications of Sharecare, who emphasizes that the app can be a great tool to improve relationships. “Good health is so much about just simple self-awareness. If you sound completely amped up and totally stressed out with a colleague and you thought you were fine, the stress that the relationship just experienced is going to play out down the line.”
For those of who prefer words by thumbs instead of by tongue, Sharecare has developed similar technology for text which will be released to the public in the nearish future. “Through this technology, it will look at the language used and the kind of emphasis with which you’re writing in the moment,” says Martin. “It won’t happen after you’ve sent it, but while you’re writing. It will tell you how you’re going to be perceived and ask you, Are you sure you want to proceed?”
Since launching in 2010, Sharecare has made nine acquisitions, raised $160 million in funding and grown to 800 employees. Additionally, nearly 40 million people, including all soldiers of the U.S. Army, have shared more than 6 billion data points about their health status and habits through Sharecare technology. Learn more about all the applications of the Atlanta Health IT superstar, including its recent partnerships with Cricket and Blackberry, through its Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
