NEC and Realeyes Unveil Biometric Emotion Analytics Service

NEC is already starting to reap the benefits of its partnership with Realeyes. The two companies first announced a strategic partnership in July, when they indicated that they would work together to develop a new emotion recognition solution.

That collaboration has now produced a new analytic solution that will launch in January of 2021. The joint solution blends emotion analysis technology from Realeyes with biometric identification and video analysis tech from NEC.

According to NEC, the new service will improve video communications for businesses and academic institutions. The technology is able to read and analyze people’s facial expressions in near-real time, displaying the results on an Analysis Dashboard as soon as they become available. With that in mind, the technology can gauge when someone is not fully engaged with the proceedings, or when someone’s attention is flagging during a digital presentation. Those results can then be used to highlight communication gaps and make meetings more efficient.

The opt-in service is compatible with smartphones and PCs, and will only read people who give their full consent. NEC believes that the solution will be especially useful during the COVID-19 pandemic, since social distancing requirements have made video conferencing a normal (and stressful) part of the workday for people all around the world.

The two companies tested the new service during web conferences in August and September. NEC is hoping that the product will allow it to capture the largest share of an emotion analysis services market that it values at 360 billion yen ($3.4 billion USD).

That services market represents a relatively small portion of the emotion detection and recognition market as a whole. Allied Market Research has predicted that the market for emotion recognition technology will be worth $33.9 billion by 2023, while MarketsandMarkets expects it to hit $56 billion by 2024.

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October 23, 2020 – by Eric Weiss