Your phone says: “Cheer up!”

ON JANUARY 6th hordes will converge on a vast conference centre in Las Vegas for the start of the International Consumer Electronics Show. At the annual shindig, tech firms will show off their latest and greatest gizmos, from smart cars to smartphones and fancy TVs. The gadgets will provoke plenty of emotions among the 160,000 or so visitors. But the devices themselves won’t be able to tell what those people are feeling.

Beyond Verbal would like to change that. The Israeli startup is one of several firms working in the field of “emotions analytics”. Its software is designed to deduce someone’s emotional state from a brief sample of his voice captured by microphone. Rather than focusing on the words used, the software analyses such things as the loudness and pitch of the speech, and then runs the results through an algorithm to match them with patterns from its database.