It has been four years since IBM's Watson learning machine put the best human trivia buffs to shame with its (literally) encyclopedic knowledge of all things. That was just a demo of the technology, though. IBM has spent the intervening years leveraging Watson's cognitive computing platform in a number of commercial applications in healthcare, banking, and education.
IBM has just unveiled a new (experimental) tool in the Watson arsenal -- the Tone Analyzer. It allows Watson to scan a piece of text and tell you what the tone of the writing is based on word use and patterns. IBM compares this to the spell check feature that's built into every word processor in the world. However, instead of checking to see if you spelled words right, it checks to see if you got the tone right.
The concept of tone in writing is, of course, considerably more abstract than spelling and grammar usage. Watson might be the perfect machine learning platform to figure it out, though. The system has access to huge pools of information that it can use to understand what words mean in context -- so-called natural language processing. That's how it clobbered the humans on Jeopardy.
There's a Tone Analyzer developer API that can be built into various tools, but there's also a demo set up by IBM(Opens in a new window) that you can play around with. When you feed in some text to Tone Analyzer, it provides data about three different types of tone -- emotion (negative emotions, anger, and cheerfulness), social (openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness), and writing styles (analytical, confident, and tentative). You can see which way the text leans just from the number of words identified in each category. For example, most of the text you come across on a site like ExtremeTech will have few emotional trigger words compared to those that fall into the social and writing tone categories. We lean toward "openness" and "analytical," as it turns out.
This idea is that Watson could basically make your writing better by ensuring that it fits your intent(Opens in a new window). You don't want to send a business memo that's overloaded with tentative style and emotion, for instance. The output in this demo shows how Watson can highlight which words were sorted into which category, and offer you synonyms to strengthen or weaken different aspects of your writing. The demo comes with a pre-loaded business-style memo, but you can drop in your own text too.
Who knows? Maybe word processors will one day have tone checker buttons right next to spell checking. For now, you'll have to rely on your own best judgement.
