Voice-stress ice-cream dispenser increases portions for the miserable

Demitrios Kargotis unveiled his Mr Whippy machine at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz. It's a self-serve frozen custard machine that doles out portion sizes based on the amount of misery it detects in a voice-stress analysis. The sadder you are, the more ice-cream you get.

Employing voice stress analysis of the user's answers to specific questions, varying degrees of unhappiness are measured and the counteractive quantity of ice cream is dispensed: The more unhappy you are, the more ice cream you need.

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Anonymous

It woud be verry easy jst to sound sad to get more ice-cream
Anonymous

We all scream for ice cream! …literally.
Jonathan Stampf

Instead of an infinite loop you may experience a downward spiral if you’re unhappy because you’re overweight.
It might have been more appropriate to have a drink dispenser that makes weaker drinks the more you slur your words.
Anonymous

That’d be the ars electronica, not ArsTechnica.

http://www.aec.at/en/index.asp
dan winckler

It’s Ars Electronica, not Ars Technica. ;) http://www.aec.at/
Anonymous

What if you are miserable because you are fat ;)
Miss Cellania

I would be very sad if I didn’t get enough ice cream.
Anonymous

That cone looks awfully small.
deusdiabolus

Inappropriate caloric intake or not, this man is about to be a hero to millions. Particularly ladies and children.

I wonder if there will be a function that automatically adds fudge or chocolate cookies?
Anonymous

What if people reaslised how the system works? They might pretend to be unhappy to get more icecream. Simulating an emotion can often make us actually feel that way, so it’d better be very good icecream!
jphilby

Gosh. I wonder if that’d work at Starbucks.
“Double” *sob* “tall caramel” *sob* “macchiato”

Worth a try I guess … the tip I read about the short cappuccino works.
bloggo

Interesting gadget. Now we will have people whose original stress has disappeared because it has been eaten away and are now stressed out because they are too fat from all the ice-cream. Nevertheless the pleasure of eating all this ice-cream could quite possibly outweigh the side-effects.
micah

it seems as though this would create an infinite loop: as you get more ice cream and become happier, you get less ice cream and become sadder, thus restarting the cycle.
Anonymous

Let’s just hope your misery isn’t tied to your obesity!
Ian Holmes

as a veteran of flaky voice-recognition on corporate phone menus, i’d be more concerned that the machine wouldn’t recognize just how pissed i was. (not to mention the fact that i might be upset because of my high cholesterol levels in the first place)