Do I sense a little bit of anxiety in your voice?

Did you know that for less than $4 per month you can learn how you move, sleep and ... sound? That's right. How you sound to others.

Last year Amazon released the Amazon Halo and Amazon Halo Band — “A New Service that Helps Customers Improve Their Health and Wellness.”

One of the features (not sure if I would call it a benefit) Amazon claims for the Halo is understanding how you sound to others.

I have no idea how I sound to begin with. I’m also certain that I sound differently to all who have heard me speak! I also know that I sound differently based on the situation, time of a day, topic discussed, etc. The number of variables is endless.

So, yes, it is a marketing gimmick similar to the mood ring, which by the way you can also buy on Amazon.

But we know that Amazon is not in the gimmick business. How do we explain this?

Maybe you recall my recent article about Amazon opening a hair salon in London. Amazon is testing technology at scale.

WIth the Amazon Halo, Amazon is conducting a test to understand your tone of voice. Where would that can be used? Amazon's own Echo with Alexa. Think of the ubiquitous device sitting in your living room (or maybe your bedroom) and listening for a word to fulfill any of your desires, for shopping, music or to answer your question about the weather.

Amazon is not the only one testing and using this technology. As an example, Spotify filed for a patent to do something very similar. A few musicians objected to it. To be fair to Spotify, when contacted about this story, they wrote back that “Spotify has never implemented the technology described in the patent in any of our products and we have no plans to do so.” On the other hand, they did actually file the patent... Is it supposed to listen to your voice, identify your tone and find music to compliment your mood?

What exactly is this tone recognition supposed to achieve? Better marketing? Improved product recommendations? Or better responses to your feelings aka manipulating you, like Facebook tried to do

Consider how often you see a relevant ad on the Internet and click on it. How often do you buy something which was presented by the recommendation engine? I am sure not that often. Still, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and all the other companies, with all their might, are trying to find the algorithm which would understand humans so they can sell you more.

This new tone-of-voice detection could be a darker path for Amazon and others. You can imagine, coming home after a rough day, grumbling angrily to yourself -- and then the voice assistant for your home won’t let you in. “I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that…” and when you answer with an angry voice, you get “This conversation can serve no purpose anymore.“

If I were running Amazon, I’d advise them to focus more on their core business of delivering goods that people want to their homes, fast. Trying to read our emotions seems like a doomed project. Think of the many ways our tone of voice can actually be interpreted. This is similar to the challenge of computers understanding sarcasm -- but interpreting tone of voice is so hard that even actual humans cannot do it reliably, even for ourselves (Think of all the arguments that have featured the classic phrase, “It’s not what you said… It’s how you said it!”).

Putting the engineering challenge aside, I’d simply say to Amazon: don’t take advantage of people when they are emotionally vulnerable. There are far better ways to actually listen to your customers. And that’s the recurrent pattern.