Elgan: Siri, how do I feel?

Computerworld - Microsoft is working on technology that will spy on you in your own home, watching your body language and face and listening to your voice for cues about your mood and emotional state.

But would you want to install such a device in your home?

Maybe you already have.

Microsoft's technology works via Kinect for Xbox 360, the company's popular motion-detection gaming peripheral.

Microsoft this month filed a patent application for a method of "Targeting Advertisements Based on Emotion."

The idea is that users would install Kinect for the fun and games. But when they're not playing, Kinect will continue to watch everything they do. It will know when they're laughing and crying, slumping or beaming.

Microsoft wants to combine this data with information collected as people conduct searches with Bing and surf the Web with Internet Explorer. Using that data, the system will build an emotional profile of a user that will enable it to deliver ads "with the highest monetization values to the users that are emotionally compatible," according to the patent application.

Microsoft's plans are merely at the patent application stage. Other major companies are much closer to implementing emotion-sensing technology.

Feeling social?

Facebook has acquired the face-recognition startup Face.com, a company whose software can scan a photograph and identify who's in it, based on user tagging.

While much of the press coverage of this acquisition has focused on the potential threat to privacy posed by facial recognition tools, a lesser-known feature of Face.com technology is the ability to detect emotion -- with stunning accuracy.

Face.com even has a Web page where you can give this technology a try. Upload a photo, and it will tell you the mood of the person in the picture. It will also identify the individual's gender and report other details. It's designed for developers, but anyone can try it. (To use it, just click on the "upload photo" link in the left nav bar and choose a picture from your computer. Or, click "Use URLs" and paste in the URL of a picture online. Then click the "Call Method" button, and hover your mouse pointer over the picture for analysis.)

Google has been offering good facial recognition tools on Google+ since last year. The company has not announced a tool for detecting emotion. But algorithm-based data-crunching of the type that emotion detection requires is Google's core competency. The company is probably working on it.

Google theoretically has a lot more access than Facebook to people's faces in real-time because of its Hangouts video service.

The company already demonstrates the ability to recognize the basic location of people's faces in Hangouts. A goofy feature called Google Effects lets users add cartoonish caricature glasses, hats, beards and other "enhancements" to their own faces while using Hangouts. The technology makes it clear that Google can recognize faces, understand their orientation and features, and do it in real time at scale.

Google+ doesn't have advertising. But if the company chose to, it could easily add "mood" as a "signal" for serving up contextual ads.

Transmitting your facial expressions but not your face

Both Facebook's integrated Skype service and Google Hangouts, as well as other services like the new Chatroulette-like Airtime, seek to persuade people to put their faces on video, where computers will be able to identify them and detect their moods.

The problem is that many people (probably most people) are uncomfortable about broadcasting images of themselves in live video chats -- but they do want to interact with people online.

There are many reasons why people don't like to do video chats. They may be shy. They may want to protect their privacy. They may be afraid of being recorded doing something embarrassing.

That's why it's likely that live-capture avatars will prove very popular on future social networking sites.

To create a live-capture avatar, a user first chooses an avatar or character. This might be a 3D cartoonish version of the user. Or it could be a picture of a bear or a celebrity or an image of a cartoon character, like Spider-Man or Bugs Bunny.