Amazon is developing an emotion-sensing wearable

The Alexa-powered hardware would offer suggestions to users on how they can better interact with people around them

Amazon is reportedly working on an Alexa-powered device that will be able to perceive human emotions through voice.

Citing an unnamed source and internal documents, Bloomberg reported that this wrist-worn gadget will work in sync with a smartphone, using its microphones to detect the emotional state of the wearer.

Eventually, it will offer suggestions to users on how they can better interact with people around them.

Amazon's Alexa team, in association with the Lab126 hardware division, is handling the project, code-named Dylan. Lab126 hardware group is credited for developing Amazon's Echo smart speakers, Kindle and Fire Phone.

The company's internal documents describe the new device as a health and wellness product. It is currently undergoing beta testing, according to Bloomberg, although there is no specific information on whether the testing includes the hardware, software or both.

There is also a chance that Amazon's new gadget will just prove to be an experiment, rather than a full-fledged commercial product.

There are many companies, including Microsoft, Google and IBM, that are currently working on technologies able to sense emotional states of a human through pictures, audio and other inputs.

Amazon has said in the past that it wants to develop a more lifelike voice assistant. The company also holds a number of patents on speech-based technologies.

One of those patents describes how an Alexa-enabled device could receive input through microphones and tag it accordingly. Another explains how voice-based technology can analyse articulation, vocal efforts and pitch variation to provide data about the emotional state of a user.

A patent that Amazon won in April this year describes a system that is able to analyse the emotions as well as the mental health state of a person.

It is difficult to say exactly what Amazon plans to do with all these technologies, although all these details do suggest that it might be looking to develop a new gadget that uses all the technologies.

'Amazon's work on a wearable device underscores its ambitions of becoming a leading maker of both cutting-edge speech recognition software and consumer electronics,' Bloomberg said in its report.

'Amazon's efforts to create smartphone software to rival Apple Inc. or Google have failed. So the company is trying to make Alexa ubiquitous in other ways,' it added.