Takara's latest: A loser detector

Index has announced it will be providing some pseudo-AI technology for the latest gadget from Takara, recently famous for the Bowlingual and Meowlingual animal speech translators. This time, they're coming out with a gadget called the Damenzu Walker (see below for an attempt to explain the name, if you need it), which purports to tell you how much of a loser a prospective boy/girlfriend is, and how well matched you are to them. The basic technology is an "AI engine" that Index calls Weiscope, which it claims is able to extract information about respondents' knowledge and feelings from survey answers and experts' interview responses, and use it to do things like personalization and product recommendations for websites.

For the Takara product it has been fed 10,000 survey results from a cellphone love horoscope site (don't this just get more and more scientific as we go along?) to get a handle on young people's take on romance, which it will use to crunch whatever information you provide about your prospective partner and inform you whether he's a pig or a prince.

The product (which will come in male and female versions) should be out in May in Japan, and will retail for Y4,179. We're on tenterhooks waiting to see if they'll try and develop a version for the English-speaking world, and what on earth they're going to call it.

[The name: Damenzu Walker = a pun on "dame" (here, loser, useless, etc.) and "men's"; there's a magazine in Japan called Men's Walker. Takara appears not to have noticed that there's already a manga with the name Damenzu Walker, however. Lawsuit! Lawsuit! Lawsuit!]

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]