IBM intros Watson Tone Analyzer to make chatbots emotionally astute ZDNet

IBM's Watson artificial intelligence platform is getting a new enhancement that will help the system detect human emotion in customer service situations. According to a blog post published Thursday, IBM Watson distinguished engineer and master inventor Rama Akkiraju said the new Tone Analyzer for Customer Engagement tool is designed to help customer service agents and chatbots craft appropriate responses to frustrated, sad, or satisfied customers. Through linguistic analysis, the tool can pick up on seven different types of tone via conversations with customer service agents and chatbots: frustration, satisfaction, excitement, politeness, impoliteness, sadness and sympathy. The system also claims to be able to detect these sentiments in emojis, emoticons, and slang. The Tone Analyzer was developed with a machine learning algorithm that trained on customer support conversations on Twitter.