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Emotient, an artificial intelligence startup, has been acquired by Apple Inc. This company has a technology that specializes in face recognition and interprets people's emotions as they watch videos or other media. Apple officially confirmed the purchase of the company on Thursday without revealing much about its terms of their deal or how they plan to use the technology. Emotient has mastered their facial-recognition software to be used for advertising purposes, audience response, research and media testing, said its website. Artificial intelligence has become an important field for Apple as it aims to build intelligent software that can tie its numerous products together. The most valuable company in the world will hire more people so that it can conduct advanced research in this field, reported Bloomberg Business

To be able to read emotions of people through the computer can open a world of opportunities for new product development. New applications can be built that can tweak itself according to the mood of the user or more tools can be developed to study how certain kind of media affects a person's state of mind. Emotient was started by six researchers from the University of California in San Diego and have been granted the patents to cover areas such as use of AI to read images and to reveal if a person would be considered attractive by another person. There has been another patent that includes the technology for evaluating the conversational tone and make automated suggestions as to what should be said in order to improve the relationship, said SF Gate.

This deal was reported by the Wall Street Journal and is completely in sync with Apple's strategy to buy small start-ups that develop promising technologies that Apple can use to better its products by integrating it in its upcoming devices. It is the past acquisitions that have resulted in services such as iTunes, Siri and the semiconductors that are used in iPhone and iPad.