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  Amazon Halo. [credit: Amazon ]

Amazon has announced Halo , a combination subscription service, app, and fitness wearable that promises to use some of the same technology the company developed for Alexa to add a new dimension to personal health tracking—tone of voice.

The product's announcement copy makes the case that "strong social connections are just as important to long-term health as adequate sleep, being fit, having a good diet, or even not smoking."

Using machine-learning-driven speech processing, the device intermittently records your voice and analyzes its tempo, rhythm, pitch, and intensity to make judgments about "the positivity and energy of your voice" where "positivity is measured by how happy or sad you sound, and energy is how excited or tired you sound."