ToneCheck yourself before you wreck yourself

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With 165 billion emails sent around the world every day, there's a good chance that some will be misinterpreted — and about half of them are, according to a recent study conducted by the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

Luckily, there's a small company in Moncton, N.B. working hard to change that.

ToneCheck is the brainchild of biz whiz Matt Eldridge, CEO of Lymbix Inc., the firm behind the program. He explained that he came up with the idea while working in franchise sales. “I was very good with customers in person or over the phone, but I was losing deals over email,” he said. “I was coming across as aggressive or pushy — I was going for excited.” He realized that his words were not being interpreted as he intended, so he searched the Internet for the emotional equivalent of spellcheck and grammar-check: a tonecheck. After his search proved fruitless, he decided to make his own, and ToneCheck was born.

With ToneCheck, users set a tolerance level for the email they want to write by choosing the intensity of emotion they want to convey. There are six emotions that ToneCheck will scan for, from affectionate and friendly to angry or shameful. After writing the email, users run ToneCheck to scan for loaded words or phrases that exceed the set tolerance levels. Similar to a spellcheck, a box pops up with the phrases in question, alerting users to the fact that they may not be sending the right message. Users can try phrasing their words in a different way and run the ToneCheck again to see how the new message could be interpreted.

Josh Merchant, co-founder and CTO of Lymbix Inc., describes the program as an algorithm that learns language. “It takes the information and looks at the commonalities between the phrasing. This process is continually making the tool smarter,” said Merchant. “It's complex and it's an aspect of how we learn.”

Another part of the way the program learns is through ToneADay, a website where users are paid to give their reactions to various words and phrases. “This allows us to collect a lot of demographic information,” said Merchant. “It shows how gender, age and location affect emotion.” ToneADay requires users to pass a qualifying test in order to participate, and currently has over 4,000 raters.

ToneCheck is currently available in beta. It was released for Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010 just over four weeks ago, and the response has already been overwhelming: over 13,000 downloads, plus media exposure from the CBC, ABC and TechCrunch, just to name a few. Eldridge said he has future plans to release versions compatible with Gmail, Thunderbird, Outlook Express and Apple Mail.

Though the company plans to release a premium version of ToneCheck in the future, “There's going to be a Light version that will always be free,” said Eldridge. The premium version will have some more sophisticated features and capabilities, but Eldridge said it will cost less than $10 per year. In his mind, even if ToneCheck saves a user from sending one or two bad emails out, it's worth the money; it can stop a user from damaging relationships with clients, friendships or even a reputation.

Not everyone's excited about ToneCheck. Contrary to naysayers who fear the program stifles personal expression, Eldridge said he feels it allows for “more creativity and it allows people to say how they really feel,” without fear of being misunderstood.

ToneCheck has also experienced some backlash from people worried their emails will be stored in the company's server or read by analysts. Users need not fret, said Merchant: “We're not storing and we can't reproduce emails ... there's nothing (in the program) that allows us to look at any information.”

“Privacy is very important,” he said, and briefly mentioned Facebook's recent privacy issues. “We would never take anybody's sensitive information and emails or have access to them in their entirety ... We have everybody's best interest at heart.”

For more information, visit www.tonecheck.com.