I bought an Amazon Halo

To track the tone of my voice, or at least, have a system that attempts to collect meaningful data about my voice.

[For the sake of staying on topic, let’s momentarily disregard the sheer amount of information this device can collect from a user ~]

The Amazon Halo is another device to assist with monitoring one’s health and well-being, separating itself from existing technology with the novel feature of monitoring one’s tone. The last piece of health-tracking technology I’ve used (besides a spreadsheet tracking how many hours I slept the night before) was the Nike Fuelband…mostly because of the fireworks animations that you would win after you hit your points goal for the day (rip Fuelband).

The most common feedback I received in a speech class I took in high school was that I “was monotone”. I’ve heard this same comment from other people in my life since that class, and while I have tried to sound more expressive — my emotions and sentiment are definitely in the words I choose and the actions I take, but I suppose that “sounding the part” can be somewhat helpful when communicating what’s inside me to people outside me — I still feel I could sound more expressive, considering I still hear this comment from time to time and how I hear my voice when I play audios and videos of me talking.

Stepping back from the concept of the Amazon Halo, the source of this writing and my decision to purchase and use the device is the desire to learn how to be a clearer expresser and communicator of myself, hand-in-hand with minimizing the probability of experiencing and causing misunderstandings in the future. In short, I want smooth[er] relationships, and this is my current approach. Just tired of relationships ending because of a lack of communication, and the counterargument to that, which could very well render the Amazon Halo useless, is:

If someone isn’t willing nor interested in hearing out an explanation to clear up a misunderstanding, they aren’t worth being in a relationship with.

Now that we know what I want, we want to explore how I can go about achieving what I want :O

One idea is to keep a daily log of conversations, where I review and note how I thought I sounded, then ask the recipient for how I came off to them. The obvious problem is that people have different working-models of language and tone: not everyone was raised in the same culture; with the same accents and language dynamics; the same models of sarcasm, flattery, persuasion and other techniques; nor does everyone spend their developmental years speaking the same language.
For whatever “insights” I beget from a select group of similar people, these insights can become immediately nullified if I, say…went out of town? Spoke to someone who was raised in a different city, state, country…continent, as was the case with my classmates, and as is the case with my coworkers? Ha…

Ok, so it’s starting to look like the practice of tracking my tone to “sound more expressive” isn’t as fruit-bearing as we might have hoped for, but surely there is some benefit to using the Amazon Halo (on the context of tone exclusively; I am not speaking about the sleep or BMI etc. features because I am most interested in Tone)?

Beyond the benefit of building up the “fundamentals” of expressing your moods via your voice, the Amazon Halo also offers the opportunity to identify relationships between “How do I sound” and “When did I sound like that”, or more simply, “What happened that influenced my tone?”

“Why was I happy at 4 pm? Was it because I did well on my exam at 3 pm?”

“Why was I nervous on the phone with my friend at 11 pm? Was it because I watched a scary movie at 930pm?”

…and so on.

The game is now, with data on when I sounded like what I did, can I find trends between events and emotions I would like more of (like happiness, joy, enthusiasm etc) and then e̵x̵p̵l̵o̵i̵t̵ go out of my way to seek those events and intentionally seek a more positive well being (as discussed earlier, tone can reflect one’s emotions and feelings).

…

Cool, I’ll try to write a post after a week and then after a month of usage and what I find. Because we haven’t defined any science — ie. in/dependent variables, controls, experimental methods — this first month will serve as a passive “What data is collected and what does the information look like on my device?” effort.

~

Related terms I thought of during writing:
Delaying gratification for future benefit
Dopamine detox for the purpose of enhancing the feeling of dope in the future
Serendipity
Mindfulness