IBM Watson Tone Analyzer Helps Make People Communication More Effective

To read the message and evaluate its general tone, the message is a common thing for a person. But, sometimes, some of the messages sent may contain several words that change the general tone of the text, making it not what the author planned to do. Can a computer system evaluate the meaning of different words and the tonality / emotion of a message by analyzing the message in automatic mode? It turns out maybe. IBM developers created a service based on IBM Watson, which is quite capable of helping all those people who often work with text (PR, marketing, communications, etc.).

The IBM Watson Tone Analyzer , a service available so far only in experimental mode, helps set the overall tone for text communication. This is the latest add-on for Watson Developer Cloud.API and SDK, which is available in the Bluemix environment.

The service uses the principle of linguistic analysis, similar to the principle of IBM Watson Personality Insights. Tone Analyzer analyzes the text provided and evaluates the emotional and social content reflected in the text. All this can be used to evaluate personal correspondence, as well as for marketing research, public relations and an automated communication center.

The three key components of the Tone Analyzer can be described as follows:

Emotional coloring: The emotions of people described in the literature and familiar to us since childhood include anger, fear, expectation, surprise, joy, sadness, trust and disgust. Service developers have created a model for evaluating emotions in the text. Tone Analyzer divides all emotions into three categories: positive emotions, negative emotions and anger. Positive emotions include joy, optimism, inspiration, happiness, contentment. Negative - fear, disgust, denial, humiliation, guilt, despair. Anger is a kind of negative emotions with such components as aggression, rage, frustration, irritation, hostility.
Social component. There is also a division into three types: openness, expression of consent, honesty (good faith). Openness is a person’s readiness for a new experience; expression of consent - the tendency to find a compromise and cooperation; honesty, honesty - the desire to act accordingly.

Style of presentation : here there are three categories: analytics, confidence and caution. The analytical style of presentation shows the desire of the author of the message to analyze, comprehend the essence of things. Confidence reflects the degree of certainty, a person’s confidence in something. And caution is the desire for a gradual development of events.


Fig. 1 Getting started with the service


Fig. 2. Text analysis by the service


Fig 3. Selection of synonyms for these words using Tone Analyzer. Here you can select words using the above categories - emotions, social coloring, presentation style.

You can use Tone Analyzer in many cases. For example, to create posts on social networks, when message authors want to be sure of the correct message of their text and its emotional coloring. The same tool can be used by marketers, public figures and representatives of many other professions. Together with the IBM Speech to Tex service, Tone Analyzer becomes a powerful tool for providing more effective communication between individuals and groups of people.

Now the service works only with English text. You can work with this tool absolutely free. Available and related technicalthe documentation .