Apple has acquired a start up from San Diego called Emotient, the company specialises in creating AI software that can recognise a person's emotional state.
Before the acquisition, the company's website claimed it would 'harvest' huge quantities of imaging data of people's faces and then use machine learning to translate this into understanding how a person was feeling.
Machine learning is a new technique of computing which essentially mimics the way the human brain works. Instead of writing a specific algorithm and then iterating it over and over again a company will use a massive supercomputer and upload huge quantities of data.
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The software will then analyse the data and as it tests itself it begins to learn from its mistakes increasing the accuracy of the answers it provides.
Little else is known about the company and since its purchase the website has become almost entirely empty.
There's no word as to why Apple would want to own a company with such a specific skill set but some are speculating that the acquisition could either be related to Apple's future versions of iOS or for its still unannounced car project.
If implemented, the software would allow Apple to use a camera to then analyse a person's face and intelligently know whether they were happy, sad or angry. This could then alter the information that was then display on the screen, change the music that was playing or even influence the way the phone behaved entirely.