04
Mon, Nov
6 New Articles

TechTip: Watson APIs - Tone Analyzer

Typography
  • Smaller Small Medium Big Bigger
  • Default Helvetica Segoe Georgia Times

Last month, we looked at Watson's Personality Insights API. This month, we take on the second API in what IBM calls the "Empathy" group, the Tone Analyzer.

By name only, you might think that Tone Analyzer is voice-oriented, but that's not true. It's actually text-oriented and is designed to give you hints as to the tone or overall feel of a piece of text. Granted, sometimes this isn't needed; the tone comes through loud and clear. But there are other times when it's hard to read between the lines and decide exactly what the text is trying to convey.

Analyzing company memos and such is probably not what you will use this for. In fact, the biggest usage would be where you interact with your customers. You could feed in social media information or even the text (using Speech to Text first) of phone calls to your service line to gauge how your customers are feeling when they call in: angry, confused, happy, delusional, whatever.  

Granted, your phone representatives should be able to determine how the customer feels in each individual call, but when you ask for an overall assessment or a rating of angry versus happy, that might be a little more difficult.

If you have used the Watson Virtual Agent package to handle your calls, you could use the output from the Tone Analyzer to help your bots adjust their responses to better match the customer's mood. And, of course, sometimes even human operators could use a little prompting as the customer goes from annoyed to angry.

Getting There Is Half the Fun

Actually, it's not, but for the purposes of this article, let's suspend reality and pretend it is.

Start at the Watson home page. Then click on the Products and Services near the top of the page. From there, select Tone Analyzer in the window that opens.

Demo

The demo associated with this product is very interesting, and it provides a lot of insight into how this thing works.

First, you are able to select the type of input that you want to analyze: a series of tweets, an online review, an email, or even a piece of text that you write. Select the one you want to use and click on Analyze.

For the demo, I took the liberty of drafting a short note that's similar to something a company might receive from a customer:

Thank you very much for receiving my call. I just wanted to tell you how very happy I am with the product I received. The suit fit my husband perfectly, and he looked very elegant as he lay in his coffin. His death was an awful shock to all of us, especially the children. He was beloved by everyone in our community and will be missed by the many people who visited the funeral home and who cried unabashedly at his grave. Again, thank you for helping to make him look wonderful.

The result was interesting.

Watson starts at the document level by providing information on the "Emotion" of the piece.

Four purely emotional categories (down from five last summer; they took out Disgust) are measured; Anger, Fear, Joy, and Sadness. The sample text is reviewed, and each category is assigned a numeric value between 0 and 1 to represent its importance in the sample. Not every category will necessarily be represented for a given sample. For example, I scored for both Joy and Sadness, but I did not have a high enough score for Anger or Fear to trigger those buttons. If you hover over the circles associated with the emotions that show up, you can see the exact score. For me, that was Joy at .63 and Sadness at .58.

In addition to emotions, Watson also tries to get a feel for the style of the piece, and it assigns similar scores to Analytical, Confident, and Tentative. I scored here with Confident, getting a .92, which I am pretty proud of.

But Watson also looks at the detail within the overall sample and actually dissects it sentence by sentence to see what makes up the whole.

This is done for each of the categories in which there is a sentence that contributed to the final rating. Interestingly enough, I did have one sentence that qualified as Analytical, but that was not enough to earn it a rating. But it's nice to know.

Technical Details

Like the other APIs in this series, IBM provides sample code on Github to get you started with integrating the Tone Analyzer into your system. There are four specific Github repos associated with this product: Python, Java, Node.js, and Curl.

Currently, you are limited to entering your data in JSON, HTML, or plain-text format with a limit of 128 KB or 1000 individual sentences. The entire 1000 sentences are analyzed for emotional tone, but only the first 100 are included in the sentence-level analysis.

An Interesting Option

Obviously, if you deal with customers and are struggling with the question of how well you're doing in terms of satisfying their needs, this tool could be a valuable asset in evaluating the situation and determining what changes, if any, you need to make in your customer service encounters.

David Shirey

David Shirey is president of Shirey Consulting Services, providing technical and business consulting services for the IBM i world. Among the services provided are IBM i technical support, including application design and programming services, ERP installation and support, and EDI setup and maintenance. With experience in a wide range of industries (food and beverage to electronics to hard manufacturing to drugs--the legal kind--to medical devices to fulfillment houses) and a wide range of business sizes served (from very large, like Fresh Express, to much smaller, like Labconco), SCS has the knowledge and experience to assist with your technical or business issues. You may contact Dave by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or by phone at (616) 304-2466.


MC Press books written by David Shirey available now on the MC Press Bookstore.

21st Century RPG: /Free, ILE, and MVC 21st Century RPG: /Free, ILE, and MVC
Boost your productivity, modernize your applications, and upgrade your skills with these powerful coding methods.
List Price $69.95

Now On Sale

BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS

LATEST COMMENTS

Support MC Press Online

$

Book Reviews

Resource Center

  • SB Profound WC 5536 Have you been wondering about Node.js? Our free Node.js Webinar Series takes you from total beginner to creating a fully-functional IBM i Node.js business application. You can find Part 1 here. In Part 2 of our free Node.js Webinar Series, Brian May teaches you the different tooling options available for writing code, debugging, and using Git for version control. Brian will briefly discuss the different tools available, and demonstrate his preferred setup for Node development on IBM i or any platform. Attend this webinar to learn:

  • SB Profound WP 5539More than ever, there is a demand for IT to deliver innovation. Your IBM i has been an essential part of your business operations for years. However, your organization may struggle to maintain the current system and implement new projects. The thousands of customers we've worked with and surveyed state that expectations regarding the digital footprint and vision of the company are not aligned with the current IT environment.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT Generic IBM announced the E1080 servers using the latest Power10 processor in September 2021. The most powerful processor from IBM to date, Power10 is designed to handle the demands of doing business in today’s high-tech atmosphere, including running cloud applications, supporting big data, and managing AI workloads. But what does Power10 mean for your data center? In this recorded webinar, IBMers Dan Sundt and Dylan Boday join IBM Power Champion Tom Huntington for a discussion on why Power10 technology is the right strategic investment if you run IBM i, AIX, or Linux. In this action-packed hour, Tom will share trends from the IBM i and AIX user communities while Dan and Dylan dive into the tech specs for key hardware, including:

  • Magic MarkTRY the one package that solves all your document design and printing challenges on all your platforms. Produce bar code labels, electronic forms, ad hoc reports, and RFID tags – without programming! MarkMagic is the only document design and print solution that combines report writing, WYSIWYG label and forms design, and conditional printing in one integrated product. Make sure your data survives when catastrophe hits. Request your trial now!  Request Now.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericForms of ransomware has been around for over 30 years, and with more and more organizations suffering attacks each year, it continues to endure. What has made ransomware such a durable threat and what is the best way to combat it? In order to prevent ransomware, organizations must first understand how it works.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericIT security is a top priority for businesses around the world, but most IBM i pros don’t know where to begin—and most cybersecurity experts don’t know IBM i. In this session, Robin Tatam explores the business impact of lax IBM i security, the top vulnerabilities putting IBM i at risk, and the steps you can take to protect your organization. If you’re looking to avoid unexpected downtime or corrupted data, you don’t want to miss this session.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericCan you trust all of your users all of the time? A typical end user receives 16 malicious emails each month, but only 17 percent of these phishing campaigns are reported to IT. Once an attack is underway, most organizations won’t discover the breach until six months later. A staggering amount of damage can occur in that time. Despite these risks, 93 percent of organizations are leaving their IBM i systems vulnerable to cybercrime. In this on-demand webinar, IBM i security experts Robin Tatam and Sandi Moore will reveal:

  • FORTRA Disaster protection is vital to every business. Yet, it often consists of patched together procedures that are prone to error. From automatic backups to data encryption to media management, Robot automates the routine (yet often complex) tasks of iSeries backup and recovery, saving you time and money and making the process safer and more reliable. Automate your backups with the Robot Backup and Recovery Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAManaging messages on your IBM i can be more than a full-time job if you have to do it manually. Messages need a response and resources must be monitored—often over multiple systems and across platforms. How can you be sure you won’t miss important system events? Automate your message center with the Robot Message Management Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAThe thought of printing, distributing, and storing iSeries reports manually may reduce you to tears. Paper and labor costs associated with report generation can spiral out of control. Mountains of paper threaten to swamp your files. Robot automates report bursting, distribution, bundling, and archiving, and offers secure, selective online report viewing. Manage your reports with the Robot Report Management Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAFor over 30 years, Robot has been a leader in systems management for IBM i. With batch job creation and scheduling at its core, the Robot Job Scheduling Solution reduces the opportunity for human error and helps you maintain service levels, automating even the biggest, most complex runbooks. Manage your job schedule with the Robot Job Scheduling Solution. Key features include:

  • LANSA Business users want new applications now. Market and regulatory pressures require faster application updates and delivery into production. Your IBM i developers may be approaching retirement, and you see no sure way to fill their positions with experienced developers. In addition, you may be caught between maintaining your existing applications and the uncertainty of moving to something new.

  • LANSAWhen it comes to creating your business applications, there are hundreds of coding platforms and programming languages to choose from. These options range from very complex traditional programming languages to Low-Code platforms where sometimes no traditional coding experience is needed. Download our whitepaper, The Power of Writing Code in a Low-Code Solution, and:

  • LANSASupply Chain is becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable. From raw materials for manufacturing to food supply chains, the journey from source to production to delivery to consumers is marred with inefficiencies, manual processes, shortages, recalls, counterfeits, and scandals. In this webinar, we discuss how:

  • The MC Resource Centers bring you the widest selection of white papers, trial software, and on-demand webcasts for you to choose from. >> Review the list of White Papers, Trial Software or On-Demand Webcast at the MC Press Resource Center. >> Add the items to yru Cart and complet he checkout process and submit

  • Profound Logic Have you been wondering about Node.js? Our free Node.js Webinar Series takes you from total beginner to creating a fully-functional IBM i Node.js business application.

  • SB Profound WC 5536Join us for this hour-long webcast that will explore:

  • Fortra IT managers hoping to find new IBM i talent are discovering that the pool of experienced RPG programmers and operators or administrators with intimate knowledge of the operating system and the applications that run on it is small. This begs the question: How will you manage the platform that supports such a big part of your business? This guide offers strategies and software suggestions to help you plan IT staffing and resources and smooth the transition after your AS/400 talent retires. Read on to learn: