If you want an insight into what Apple may be cooking for home control without all the marketing gloss that Apple will end up giving it, then reading Brian Roemmele’s background piece on Emotient is well worth the investment of 10 or so minutes to read.
Emotient is one of Apple’s most recent purchases. Inking the deal at the start of 2016, Emotient will allow Apple to achieve something seemingly magical: it’ll allow Apple hardware, with Siri as the potential UI, to interpret the 43 muscles in your face. And from those, it’ll be able to work out who you are and what you’re feeling.
Emotient is the leading authority on facial expression recognition and analysis technologies that are enabling a future of emotion aware computing.
Apple have bought heavily into this space of late. The application for home control is obvious: its killer app. Emotient’s technology could figure into the rumoured Amazon Echo killer, and it could also come to power new iOS APIs.
It could also power entirely new categories for the company beyond home control. Consider their other purchases of PrimeSense and FaceShift, a company whose software allows 3D animated characters to mimic the facial expressions of an actor.
There’s more here brewing than just a new entry into the field that Amazon Echo and Google Home are both trying to figure out.