Amazon’s Latest Bracelet Will Point Out Your Flaws and Tell You If You’re Being ‘Condescending’ or ‘Dismissive’

Amazon is more than just a place to shop. They also have their own innovative products like the Kindle and the Echo. Now, Amazon is getting ready to release a new product that at first glance sounds a lot like a FitBit, yet, it’s really quite a bit different.

The Amazon Halo is a bracelet with an activity tracker built-in. Unlike the FitBit, it does not have a screen. According to Amazon’s description of the product, which is currently available in Early Access, there isn’t a screen so that it won’t be distracting. We see the point, yet, we’ve always used our fitness tracker as a watch, and we never found knowing what time it was distracting.

The band comes in 3 colors, black, blush and winter (white). It also comes in three sizes, small, medium and large. There is a convenient size guide to help shoppers choose the right size.

The screenless tracking device includes features you would expect like activity tracking, sleep monitoring and guided workouts; however, there is a new feature that we have never seen on an activity tracker until now, and we’re not sure how we feel about it.

The Halo includes a feature called Tone. Amazon describes this features as follows: “Analyze qualities of your voice like energy and positivity to help strengthen communication.”

At first, that doesn’t sound so bad, but when we scrolled down further into the product description, we got a better understanding of what that voice monitoring looks like. The Amazon description explains that you can “see how you sound.” Does your voice sound, positive or negative? Do your kids think you sound angry or energetic? If you’ve ever had someone ask you “what’s wrong” based on the tone of your voice yet your weren’t actually in a bad mood, this is kind of the digital version of that. The goal is to help wearers “maintain relationship health.”

Perhaps this could be a great passive aggressive gift for someone who sounds rude all the time, but we’re not sure how we’d feel about receiving this as a gift ourselves.

If you have anything other than an American accent and/or speak a language other than English, this tracker probably isn’t for you. According to Amazon, “Tone currently works best for American English speakers, but Halo is always getting smarter.”

Besides the lack of screen and addition of tone monitoring, the Halo has one other big difference from the Fitbit and similar devices. The Halo requires a membership to access all of the features like activity and sleep tracking. The membership is included for the first 6 months, but after that, it costs $3.99 each month to keep access to all of these features. If a wearer decides not to pay for the membership, he or she will still have access to basic information like number of steps, heart rate and sleep time.

The Halo is currently at a special price of $64.99, which seems like a really good deal compared to similar devices. Once it is out of Early Access, the price will go up to $99.99.

How do you feel about a tracking device that gives you feedback on your tone of voice?