In the span of just a few years, apps have changed the way we live and go about our everyday lives. From shopping for food to shopping for love, apps have rendered us addicted* to the worlds inside our mobile phones.
Everything has changed, except the way we write.
Remarkably, when it comes to writing blogs, emails, papers, reports and novels, the process remains unchanged since 1984.
To write a piece of content, you grabbed a fresh page, collected your thoughts and started writing. Sometimes you may click on B, I or U to make your writing fancier, sometimes you may open an extra window to do some research.
However, when it comes to writing, we are repeating the same process today as our parents and grandparents did over 32 years ago.
Can we make writing better?
How we could improve writing is the question that our research team posed at the start of this year. To test our hypothesis, we explored whether we could make writing easier for authors by integrating cognitive and AI technologies directly into the editor. We built a couple of elements based on IBM Watson’s cognitive services and put them to the test.
In my previous posts, I’ve discussed how our Cognitive Assistant can help improve writing with the inclusion of recent and relevant facts. In the next part of this series, I will talk about an exciting new feature that will allow an author to pay attention to their writing tone with the Tone Analyzer solution.
What is the Tone Analyzer?
The Tone Analyzer is an editor extension that automatically processes text as you type it in the editor. It analyzes text and returns the emotional tone(s) that your readers will sense when they read your writing.
“[explores tone analyzer in detail] Oh, ok. So the brighter ones are the tones that I have used…so this shows passion, this shows spontaneity, this shows trustworthiness…I guess it’s because I’m being very honest. That’s cool. So I guess a good article would have a mixture of different things.”
Imagine that you are writing a blog post to tell your friends about a fun trip you recently took to New York City. Your writing will best resonate with your readers if it is perceived as trustworthy, passionate, and perhaps a little analytical. As you write, the Tone Analyzer keeps you updated on how your writing is likely to be perceived by your readers, and what steps you can take to make adjustments if needed.
As you write, the Tone Analyzer updates you on the emotional tones that are likely to be perceived by the readers of your blog. Hovering on any of the tones provides information about the tone (if it’s present), or how to add more of it (if it is not currently present).
How will the Tone Analyzer help you write better?
Our work with the Tone Analyzer began with the hypothesis that we could make writing better by reducing the cognitive load of task switching during the content creation process.
In my next post, we look at the technology that underpins the Tone Analyzer.
*Referenced works:
Exploring Smartphone Addiction: Insights from Long-Term Telemetric Behavioral Measures, 2015
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[…] my previous post, I describe how the Tone Analyzer could make writing easier for content creators. In this post, we […]