Originally published by Globes, Israel’s leading financial newspaper, on May 26, 2005
A new Israeli invention uses voice samples to analyze emotions, personality, physiology, and most importantly, what customers will buy.
Just let Dr. Yoram Levanon, 59, listen to you while you’re talking freely, even for just 30 seconds, and heu says that he can find out more about you than you do. Levanon, an Israeli inventor, is currently in the process of registering a patent on his method of diagnosing dyslexia, autism, and other medical and psychological problems using a voice sample. His method utilizes computerized diagnosis. You talk, the computer makes the diagnosis.
If Levanon has got it right, his invention may prove greater than the polygraph. In contrast to the polygraph, Dr. Levanon’s machine does not investigate what we know, but what we half the time don’t know: our personality structure, at the most basic emotional level. The machine asks, and, according to its inventor, also answers, far more practical and day-to-day questions than those asked in a police interrogation: what excites you, what motivates you, and how this knowledge can be exploited to market a new magazine, computer program, or yogurt to you in the next 30 seconds. Also, whether you’re dyslexic.
Levanon objects to the comparison to a polygraph. He emphasizes that he does not purport, nor is he willing, to forecast people’s fates. “I’m not an astrologer or a graphologist,” he says, while reading a graph analysis of customers’ voices, and using it to give a clear description of them and their world. Without having heard their voices himself, he outlines the characters of famous people whose voices I brought him, according to analysis performed by his devices. For example, former US President Bill Clinton proved to be a typical man driven by desire, but with unlimited ambition, who is more of an order-giver than a doer. In United Mizrahi Bank chairman and former Israeli Security Agency (ISA, formerly known as the General Security Services or GSS) head Jacob Perry, Levanon finds strong survival ability, a high degree of self-control, and a sense of mission. “He’s willing to follow things to the end, and forego love,” Levanon says, pointing to a point on the frequency curve.
