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 By Brian Benoit, Manager, Solution Consultants

Do you ever wonder if the words you write convey the tone you’re intending?  Or have you ever read something and misinterpreted the tone?

Written word holds a lot of ambiguity. Maybe you wrote an email to a colleague with good intentions, but they interpreted it as ibm tone analyzer aggressive. Or maybe you received some customer feedback and couldn’t even determine the tone. And I’m sure all of us at least once have received the dreaded “fine” text message like my co-worker did from his wife…

Words alone are tough to interpret. That’s why IBM created a cognitive tool in their IBM Bluemix lineup that uses linguistic analysis to detect tones from text.

IBM Bluemix is a series of tools in the cloud that perform a variety of functions. Most people heard of or watched IBM’s Watson play Ken Jennings on Jeopardy. Watson is a category of IBM Bluemix tools.

Another tool is IBM Watson Tone Analyzer Service (IBM Tone Analyzer). IBM Tone Analyzer ingests any text and gives back an analysis of the overall tone of the content. It primarily identifies the following emotions:

  • Joy
  • Fear
  • Sadness
  • Disgust
  • Anger

IBM Tone Analyzer also considers social tendencies and language styles. These include things like openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional range, confidence and tentativeness.

The analysis provides users with an overall summary and highlights the key sentences that evoke certain tones.

Businesses use IBM Tone Analyzer to get feedback about their communications. They can run a letter or memo through the software to see if the perceived tone is what they intended and then make adjustments as necessary.

IBM allows everyone to try the tool. Enter a blog post, email message, corporate announcement, or even a text conversation with your wife! Our Director of Products used it to determine the tone of Donald Trump’s presidential nomination acceptance speech.

If you attend IBM World of Watson 2016 and want to see how to take IBM Tone Analyzer further and apply it to your business, sign up for a hands-on lab that I’m hosting along with some of my other colleagues: Building Cognitive Solutions Using IBM Bluemix and IBM Case Manager.