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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

Someone please make an app that makes psychiatric analysis based on voice! I can think of a million uses, from tracking my own mood to secretly diagnosing my co-workers.

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>Psychiatric analysis based on voice

The benefits of this when implemented correctly nonwithstanding, there's a major problem in that any implementation is highly likely to be quite flawed. See the proliferation of "health-tracking" apps that are basically quackery. With psychiatric analysis --- where the signals to track are much weakly defined than heart rate, blood pressure, etc. --- it is far too likely that apps will consistently make poor diagnoses, to the detriment of the user.

I did plenty of graduate work with speech recognition; and detecting cognitive states based on speech is not much better than a coin-flip. Depression, drunkenness, deceit, happiness, etc. are hard to detect for an arbitrary person with accuracy. Speech signals for latent states in human behavior are highly idiosyncratic. The answer I always give when asked if something can be detected by speech (most requested - lying): "Yes, but only if you have a lot of time and want it to be accurate for at most a couple people. And it's going to be expensive."

Agreed that this alone would be insufficient but there's value in sharing this information with the patient's doctor, who could choose to ignore it if there's no other evidence.

Besides, we have to start somewhere, right? If I had the opportunity, I would release it as an open-source project for other medical professionals to improve upon. I certainly wouldn't go as far as submitting it to the app store for the reasons you mentioned, i.e. the detriment to the user.

>to secretly diagnosing my co-workers.

Interesting that you explicitly mention you'd do it without their knowledge/consent...

I think that part was sarcastic. Everyone hates that guy who reads five sentences from Wikipedia and is convinced you have an especially bad case of the Bajoran flu.

Any sort of learned tells from human psychology could be extended on that principle then.

Just seemed weird to me to mention doing it in a secretive/unconsenting manner, of people you're supposed to trust, and handing off private conversations to third parties without asking. It says a lot about respect toward one another.

Put something based on this in the router.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/opinion/sunday/how-depress...

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