

ToneCheck Checks Your Tone Like A Spell Checker Checks Your Spelling - ianbishop
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/tonecheck/?utm_source=TweetMeme&utm_medium=widget&utm_campaign=retweetbutton

======
tocomment
Any ideas how this could work? Is it some kind of machine learning? I can't
really picture it.

~~~
spokey
In a crude fashion this isn't difficult to do: Simply look for things like
emotionally charged words and phrases, certain sentence structures, or maybe
even word and sentence length.

This is a fairly well studied area, search on the keyword "sentiment analysis"
for more information, including a number of open source implementations.
ToneCheck even seems to be using the 6 basic emotion categories that everyone
else uses, although they've tweaked the names a bit.

It looks like they've crowd sourced evaluating the emotional content of words
and phrases at <http://toneaday.com/>.

My guess, largely without evidence, is that they are primarily basing their
analysis on words and phrases and are relying on a better word->emotion
dictionary than most to provide a competitive advantage. There are a number of
open source tools that do this sort of thing, the ones I've seen relied
heavily on the dictionary approach as well.

This is a very clever idea and positioning, certainly a better way to
productize this technology than the ideas that had been floating around my
head.

~~~
joshmerchant
Good find ;-) in face you're right. We're heavy on the crowd sourcing models.
But.... it goes further than that. We've got patented technology that surround
the connotative capabilities to truly collect and measure the emotional
effects of words, phrases, punctuation, emoticons, etc. We've built an
adaptive learning engine that is learning new language that's spoken today.
It's also self-healing - the more the tool is used, the smarter it gets.

Thanks for your feedback! We're certainly happy to hear people's interest in
our tools. We've abstracted our system into an API (called ToneAPI).. if
you're interested in building emotional tools - sign up!

Thanks!

Josh

