Because we commonly communicate via text messages and emails, it's easy for your feelings to get lost in translation since the recipient cannot know what attitude you intended on conveying. Messages can either come off as rude, or your sincere excitement may come off a bit fake.
Now that could change because IBM unveiled a new API that allows its supercomputer Watson to detect the attitude in your writing.
The Watson Tone Analyzer reads through imputed passages of text to perform a "tone check" to find out the emotional and social tone, as well as the writing style in the piece, which shows the user's reasoning and analytical attitude about things.
After analyzing the text, the supercomputer can detect whether the writing has a cheerful, angry or negative tone, then further classify it into categories depending on the openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness of the writing.
Much like how spell check works, the Watson Tone Analyzer then suggests alternate words to either soften or strengthen the overall tone. The "tone check" can suggest words to swap out to make a negative message more agreeable.
This linguistic analysis tool can be used for personal and business communication, self-branding, market research, public relations management, and automated contact center management.
The only flaw with this system is that it's hard for Watson to understand writing styles that include sarcasm or humor, and problems arise when there are multiple meanings for one word. Not all suggestions make sense.
This cognitive analysis tool is part of IBM's suite of cooking, health and other apps that use the supercomputer's powerful analytical abilities.
IBM's Watson Tone Analyzer is an experimental service that is available free for exploration with English text input.
Via: Engadget
Photo: Atomic Taco | Flickr
