Originally an Israeli start-up company that claims to do
emotion recognition using vocal intonations, could Beyond Verbal’s vocal analyzing
system also serve as an early medical diagnostic tool?
By: Ringo Bones
When Dr. Yoram Levanon founded Beyond Verbal back in 2012,
their patented computer algorithm was originally intended to provide emotion
recognition by analyzing subtle and not-so-subtle vocal intonations. Beyond
Verbal commercializes a patented technology from 18 years of research by
physicists and neuropsychologists into the mechanisms of human intonations. The
company says that its technology enables machines to understand human emotions
by analyzing raw voice intonations as people speak. This technology is based on
research of over 70,000 subjects in more than 30 different languages, which led
to the development of the app that extracts people’s moods, attitudes and
personality from the intonations of their voice. Together with neuro-psychologist
Dr. Lan Lossos, the original idea for Beyond Verbal came when Dr. Levanon began
showing interest in how babies – who do not understand a single word – are able
to figure out exactly what their caretakers feel toward them. Levanon and
Lossos then studied over 60,000 test subjects in at least 26 languages and
their success in extracting, decoding and measuring human moods, attitudes and
personalities gave birth to what they call Emotional Analytics.
Years later, it was found out that their app can also manage
to detect illness through the sound of one’s voice. As of 2019, during various
interviews with the press, CEO, founder and Beyond Verbal’s chief scientist Dr.
Yoram Levanon states that the latest version of their Beyond Verbal app has the
ability to be able to analyze diseases via the human voice with up to
75-percent accuracy in tests via a newly added classifier using vocal
biomarkers. The latest version of the Beyond Verbal app has now the ability to
detect early signs of Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer and even early
signs of autism in children.
