Listen up, boneheads, and you might actually learn something.
Now, if I were a particularly tone-deaf individual, I might actually think that the above sentence was an interesting way to grab your attention. Or maybe a wink-wink way of being cute/funny. On the other hand, a number of people read those nine words and immediately started thinking, “That no good …”
Why? Because I didn’t write it like this:
Listen up, boneheads, and you might actually learn something. 🙂 🙂 🙂 Â
You see, the tone and emotion of the things we write can be easily misinterpreted without some grinning or grimacing emoji attached. That’s especially true when the stuff you’re writing and sending out is in micro-blast form, such as an email or a tweet. And if you’re not careful about the words you use, well, things get worse from there.
The brain trust at IBM wants you to know, however, that it has come up with a way that you can avoid my fumble-fingered tone-faux pas. They’ve put their super computer IBM Watson on the case and come up with a “Tone Analyzer” that you can use to check your emails, blogs and whatever. You can try a demo of the technology here. Think of it in the same category as a spell-checker, only for emotions. It uses its cloud-based linguistics savviness to sift through any chunk of text and tell you if your quickly chosen words are every bit as happy, sad, assertive or angry as you intended them to be.
So how does it work? Well, it examines your sentences—from short how-are-yas to lengthy diatribes—and starts assigning color-coded evaluations of the emotional, social and writing style “tones” of your scribblings. And then it may suggest substitute words and synonyms you can plug in if some of your choices come off the wrong way.
That doesn’t mean that Watson’s prodigious programing will always get the feel right. I plugged a made-up email from a potentially red-faced boss into the analyzer that said:
“You’re an idiot, Sonny. You’ve fallen flat on your face, once again. What are we gonna do with you? Hope your day’s been going well so far … ’cause you’re fired! Sam”
As you can see, I was told that my note ranked high in the areas of agreeableness (defined as “one’s tendency to be compassionate and cooperative towards others”) and openness (defined as “the extent to which a person is open to experiencing a variety of activities”). And, well, that evaluation seemed less than helpful if I was hoping to curb the angry boss bits in my message to Sonny.
Of course, when I jotted down, “IBM Watson is stupid,” the program definitely thought I was being way too angry and negative. So, hey, maybe that means the ever-intuitive Watson thought that bonehead Sonny deserved a little dressing-down, too.
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