Watsonfinds uses the power of IBM‘s Watson APIs natural language processing to gauge audience connection to your posts. Watson is IBM’s cognitive suite built to answer questions in Jeopardy demonstrated in the video below.
Forming an emotional connection with your readers (of the right sort) should provide more engagement with your blog. Posts are analysed by Watsonfinds which indicates if the content would be read with joy, anger, disgust, sadness or fear. The plugin uses the Tone Analyser API available within the Watson API suite.
Installing Watsonfinds creates a new button in the visual editor and a new menu item. When pressed a window opens that provides an analysis of the emotional content in the editor. The plugin shows a large emoji style icon showing the predominant emotion. A paragraph describes why the particular feeling is a good thing. Registering a second emotion at a similar level in the content will also be displayed. Below the section five bar graphs, one for each emotion, display a percentage level which shows how strongly the content analysis in that category. The menu options provide a text box into which content can be pasted or typed, so you can enter text for study without using the full editor.
Posts of a single emotion will only appeal to a selection of readers whereas a range of emotional content will attract readers of different types. Building an emotional link with your readers will elicit better engagement and stronger reaction in their comments. So having some idea of how the audience reads your content (as opposed to just you) will be helpful in building that relationship.
A timeline which bookmarks the tone each time a post is submitted to Watsonfinds helps determine what words and phrases affect the tone. While the timeline feature is useful, I’d prefer some analysis of tone across all my posts, in a similar way to the SEO summary used by Toast.
A premium version enjoys additional features such as social and emotional tone analysis is planned. The pre will add depth to the analysis Watsonfinds already does. The payments here would go to help support the API cost of the Watson analysis calls. In this era of APIs and cloud, nothing is entirely as free as it seems, as each API call requires computer and network resources. Depending on the number of deployments, and how many of them take up the premium option will determine if this is a viable economic model.
Watsonfinds is a useful plugin and should find a place in your WordPress installation.
