Every email matters.
Introducing RiteTone, your emotional intelligence assistant.
According to Psychology Today, emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and influence the emotions of others.
RiteTone helps you increase your emotional intelligence in email conversations by providing insights into the emotional tone and language style for emails you are about to send, and in understanding emails you have received.
RiteTone is supported in Outlook on the Web, Outlook 2013+, Outlook 2016+, and Outlook 2016 for Mac environments.
Never again get an unexpected reaction to your email because your words were not interpreted as you intended.
Never miss the subtle cues from a sender on their emotional tone and writing style.
Regardless of what you are doing with email, the analysis results are displayed right beside your work. You can quickly make changes before you hit send.
If you sometimes misinterpret how someone is feeling from an email you get, or you wonder how your email was so misunderstood by the recipient, RiteTone can help.
People read an email and based on the words, instantly judge the other person's state of mind. They may assume them to be angry, sad, confident, tentative or some combination of those. As well, when using email people are more likely to perceive negative emotions with greater intensity than they do positive emotions.
RiteTone saves you time and reduces misunderstandings by helping you manage how you come across to the other person. RiteTone does this by using linguistic analysis to detect two key aspects of any conversation: emotional tone and language style.
If you would like to know more, please see the research details at ibm.com.
Each sentence below conveys a very different strong tone or style. Confidence ranges up to 90%, disgust ranges up to 68%, and analytical ranges up to 77%.
RiteTone uses IBM Watson™ Tone Analyzer service to detect emotional and language tones. This service has been successfully used in predicting:
| Category | Tone/Style | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Emotional | Joy | Joy or happiness has shades of enjoyment, satisfaction and pleasure. There is a sense of well-being, inner peace, love, safety and contentment. |
| Fear | A response to impending danger. It is a survival mechanism that is a reaction to some negative stimulus. It may be a mild caution or an extreme phobia. | |
| Sadness | Indicates a feeling of loss and disadvantage. When a person can be observed to be quiet, less energetic and withdrawn, it may be inferred that sadness exists. | |
| Disgust | An emotional response of revulsion to something considered offensive or unpleasant. It is a sensation that refers to something revolting. | |
| Anger | Evoked due to injustice, conflict, humiliation, negligence or betrayal. If anger is active, the individual attacks the target, verbally or physically. If anger is passive, the person silently sulks and feels tension and hostility. | |
| Language | Analytic | A person's reasoning and analytical attitude about a subject. A higher score is more likely to be perceived as intellectual, rational, systematic, emotionless, or impersonal. |
| Confidence | A higher score is more likely to be perceived as assured, collected, hopeful, or egotistical. | |
| Tentative | A person's degree of inhibition. A higher score is more likely to be perceived as questionable, doubtful, limited, or debatable. |
| Before | After | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| "I'm really part of the team." | "I’m very happy that the team has accepted me as a full member." | ||
| Analytical | |||
| Joy | |||
| Confidence | |||
| Analysis |
|---|
| The writer is stating that they feel part of the team. The "before" sentence converys this message in a rational and emotionless fashion. However, if the writer wants to convey feelings of their joy and confidence in being part of the team, the "after" sentence works better. |
| Before | After | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| "I feel it facilitated my trust in people." | "My trust in people was made easier by it." | ||
| Tentative | |||
| Joy | |||
| Analysis |
|---|
| Both sentences are very similiar in getting their point across but tentativeness has been replaced by joy in the "after" version. A much more positive message. |
| Before | After | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| "I disliked my teacher." | "My teacher and I did not get along at all." | ||
| Anger | |||
| Confidence | |||
| Analysis |
|---|
| Both sentences are very similiar in meaning but anger has been replaced by confidence in the "after" example. Determine how you want to be considered by the person reading the email and then use the right words to set the tone and style. |
RiteTone analyzes both incoming and outgoing emails. The RiteTone add-in integrates directly into the Office ribbon, as if it were a native part of Outlook.
The RiteTone dashboard identifies five different emotional tones and three different language styles, at both an overall email level, and individual sentence level. RiteTone also allows you to filter this information, to focus on the tones, styles and attributes that are important to you.
RiteTone is based on research to understand whether the words we use in our day-to-day lives reflect who we are, how we feel, and how we think. After several decades of effort in this area, it is now accepted in psychology, marketing, and other fields that language reflects more than just what we want to say. The frequency with which we use certain types of words can provide clues to personality, thinking style, social connections, and emotional states.
There are many advantages to using email in the workplace. On one hand it's quick, and at the same time you can choose when to respond. However, in face-to-face or even voice communication, we rely heavily on visual and verbal information like facial expression, body posture, gestures, and voice tone to interpret and predict other people's behavior.
Without these important visual and verbal cues, our imaginations fill in the blanks as to what the person sending the message intended, and how they felt about the communication. We rarely fill in the blanks with positive intentions. This can lead to misunderstanding, damaged relationships, and poor business decisions.
This is why we built RiteTone. We help people communicate better via email by using a tool that helps you understand the emotional context of not only yourself but the other person as well.