Emotional Spell Check: Why decipher your feelings when a machine can do it for you?

Do you ever have a hard time interpreting the tone of your e-mails? Since there is no emoticon for "sarcasm" or "passive aggression", it's often hard to tell whether that cleverly constructed e-mail from your co-worker was actually a subtle dig at you or not. Well, take your thinking cap off, because there is now a software plug-in that will do all of that emotional interpretation nonsense for you!


An article on Mashable today discussed a new agreement between Lymbix and Sherpa Software that will bring what they call "sentiment analysis technology" to IBM's Lotus products. This technology is designed to check the emotional tone of your e-mail's content, and will alert you with words or phrases that could be misinterpreted.


Outlook already has ToneCheck for evaluating message content, and is designed to help professionals from accidently sending out emotionally-ambiguous e-mails. According to the article, an upgraded version of ToneCheck for Outlook should be released sometime later this month.


Ahh, the power of technology!