IBM ‘Spellchecks’ Your Emotions To Help You Find Love

Have you been looking for love in all the wrong places? Maybe IBM can help.

The tech company has lifted the lid on new and expanded cognitive APIs for developers that enhance the emotional and visual senses of IBM’s supercomputer, Watson.

Unlucky in love

One of the new APIs is Tone Analyzer, which IBM says can help online daters – who are unlucky in love – to find and interact with their true love.

Tone Analyzer is a lot like a spell check, according to IBM. In its original manifestation, it could be used to perform a ‘tone check’ to provide insights about types of tones in a piece of text including emotion (negative emotions, cheerfulness, anger), social propensities (openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness), and writing styles (analytical, confident, and tentative). It could even make suggestions for alternative word choices to soften or strengthen a desired tone.

In this new beta version, Tone Analyzer now analyses other emotions, including joy, disgust, fear, and sadness, as well as new social propensities, including extraversion and emotional range.

Also new to the beta version, Tone Analyzer is moving from analysing single words to analysing entire sentences. This analysis is helpful in situations that require nuanced understanding. For example, in speech writing it can indicate how different remarks might come across to the audience, from exhibiting confidence and agreeableness to showing fear. In customer service, it can help analyse a variety of social, emotional and writing tones that influence the effectiveness of an exchange.

Tone Analyzer is being utilised by Connectidy, a dating app that markets itself as the first of its kind to use real science, a cognitive matching application and advanced technology to help people find love.

Dineen Tallering, president of Connectidy, said that the app uses Watson’s personality insights to utilise users’ own data and what matters to them.

She added: “How often have you asked a colleague to read something over your shoulder to check everything is ok? Some 67 percent of the time when people send out text messages or emails they are completely misunderstanding what people will think they mean.

“We call this use of the API a spellchecker for your emotions. We all know that men and women communicate differently. Tone Analzyer steers people away from writing the wrong thing as they are writing it.”

The other APIs, aimed at enhancing Watson’s visual and emotional analysis are Emotional Analysis and Visusal Recognition (both in beta), and an updated version of Expressive TTS, formerly known as Text To Speech (TTS).

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