7 ms·
Crystal promises to help you understand how best to talk to any person
- klunger 11y agoI see this being picked up and adapted for use by recruiters and HR types.
- kelukelugames 11y agoThis is not creepy. This is brilliant. We already tailer our face to face communication for different people.
- hellbanner 11y agoThis is for people who can't remember who they're talking to?
- astine 11y agoOr have not sent an email to that person before.
- benologist 11y agoOr do a bad job of reading people.
- j4kp07 11y agoSo, it's an article spinner for Gmail.
- fchollet 11y agoNow is as good a time as any to link to this interesting essay by PG: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- trg2 11y agoIt would be interesting to hear wether or not PG believes that most of this still applies 10 years later.
- bcoates 11y agoI don't get it: this doesn't seem like the sort of perennial advertisement-as-trend-story that PG's complaining about at all. Wired writing about new tech products isn't creepy PR infringing on journalism, it's why people read it in the first place.
- TaylorAlexander 11y agoWired's writing is fine, it's Crystal that's creepy. An unknown proprietary algorithm tells us what to write to our friends? Soon they'll just write for us. Does an advertiser want 1 million people to casually mention something to their friends today? Have the algorithm work it in! Crystal gives companies a new and more powerful tool for spreading their messages. Of course the first use is always innocent, but if this tech caught on (I can imagine in some form it will) then there is a lot of potential here for PR firms to interject their messages. EDIT: I should add, I don't see Crystal as bad. I see it as inevitable. People have been blindly sharing private data on the web for a decade because no one used it? People will start using it.
- discardorama 11y ago> Soon they'll just write for us. Thereby freeing us from the drudgery of writing emails to each other. We'll have more free time! </sarcasm>
- d-equivalence 11y agoActually, something akin to that is already being done. Take a look at this http://www.persado.com http://www.persado.com. The co-founder is a guy from Upstream (a Greek mobile marketing company)
- trhway 11y ago>it's Crystal that's creepy. An unknown proprietary algorithm tells us what to write to our friends? Soon they'll just write for us. Does an advertiser want 1 million people to casually mention something to their friends today? well, another, say Quartz, app would read the message and decide to write back through for example the same Crystal. Complete automating of social life of automatons. While they are at it, we can socialize on our own...
- slig 11y agoDirect link to the service: https://www.crystalknows.com/home https://www.crystalknows.com/home
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoCrashed my browser - FF 37.0.1 on Kubuntu.
- codesuela 11y agothis, that page just causes FF to crash silently on Ubuntu FF
- pimlottc 11y agoNot only is the coffee email example an animation, but it's tied to the scroll bar. This make no sense. I was wondering why the text was cut off before I realized what was going on. The images are starting to scroll off the top of the page before it shows me the entire text!
- ianstallings 11y agoI think I might make the lunatic version of this. When you email ian cuss like a sailor and spit a lot. Challenge him to a fight in the first three sentences. Tell him star wars > star trek to throw down the gauntlet. As him about his mother.
- gopher2 11y agoThis is neat. Reminds me of http://www.hemingwayapp.com http://www.hemingwayapp.com Anyone aware of other stuff like this or want to shamelessly promote something? I'm interested.
- vilhelm_s 11y agoHeh, Hemingway is a cute idea, I had not seen that before. It seems a bit miscalibrated though. I tried pasting in the current front-page article from The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/24/obama-drone-strikes-killed-hostages http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/24/obama-drone-str...), and it becomes almost completely red ("27 out of 37 sentences are very hard to read"). If it categorizes ordinary newspaper prose as "very hard", I wonder what kind of audience it is aimed at.
- jeorgun 11y agoI can't help but be reminded Mark Libermans's assessment of the app (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416).
- Balgair 11y agoEh, I think the app is a good first pass for many people. Use it and the Up Goer Five editor as a way to generate ideas for how to shorten and increase readability of your work. I find it very useful when using scientific writing in order to recheck your work for ease of communication. http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ http://splasho.com/upgoer5/
- cbd1984 11y ago> 1 adverbs. Aim for 0 or fewer. Yes, the app is apparently quite insane. It's classic Strunk & White nonsense, the idea that simpler (even to the point of being simplistic) is always, always, always better, founded on the unfounded idea that removing words is the only way to linguistic correctness. http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497 http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...
- notahacker 11y agoThe sceptic in me says that what the average person writes on the web that's easily and accurately traceable to them says relatively little about their preferred email communication style (if the algorithm had access to their "inbox" and "sent items" it might be a different matter.) I'm intrigued by whether the advice it offers focuses on mimicking their own communication style of whether it gets a bit more clever and human, and advises people (e.g.) to phrase things in a very deferential manner to somebody who gives the appearance of pomposity.
- ses4j 11y agoWeird. I was just reading William Hertling's Avogadro Corp (http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appears/dp/0984755705 http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appea...) and the premise of that book is that someone builds this product exactly. Unfortunately, it very quickly goes all Skynet/HAL on the world.. oh well.
- jemfinch 11y agoSpoilers.
- zan2434 11y agowas about to post this exactly. Looks like it really is closer than it appears!
- gotofritz 11y agoThat's the problem with the increasing speed of technological advance, it makes it impossibile to enjoy SF as by the time you are halfway through the book it's already happened in real life!
- gotofritz 11y agoThat's the problem with the increasing speed of technological advance, it makes it impossibile to enjoy SF as by the time you are halfway through the book it's already happened in real life!
- logicallee 11y agoI don't know about his boss, but when I read that he responded "Done. Absolutely. It's taken care of." when offered the story, I knew I was reading one juicy story! One he was super-excited to write! I stopped reading shortly after he let the cat out of the bag that that wasn't his actual response to the stated story. so - worked on me!
- asifjamil 11y agoThe only way this would be a killer feature in my book is if it analyses my entire inbox to generate the result. It would be more realistic since it is actually based on email and not published writing samples, which are not always indicative of communication.
- gopher2 11y agoI just signed up and it has the option to suck in your gmail/outlook and provide you a "communication style" profile that's 1) definitely accurate at least for me 2) kind of cool to see a la personality style quiz. So if you email me or anyone else who has done that it will I assume incorporate that.
- mkmk 11y agoWhen you try it once or twice, it looks quite cool because you see a very detailed description of exactly what the person wants to hear. Then you do it a few more times and you realize that the detailed descriptions are actually a nice piece of copywriting that is re-used over and over again. Some of the magic is lost once you realize that the system is not really as precise as the copywriting implies.
- analog31 11y agoLike the Forer personality test?
- chromanoid 11y agoIt would be interesting to see what happens when everybody in a company starts using this software (mails as only source of information). After some time it would probably lead to very few dominant communication styles. Reminds me of translation party.
- keithpeter 11y ago"Add your name to the waiting list, and we'll send you an invite when we are accepting more users." Looked interesting in an abstract kind of way, but can't be arsed to play hard to get. Anyone got documentation on these "64 personality types" and the underlying theory?
- khc 11y agoMy immediate thought is applying this to okcupid messages. Okcupid can figure out what kind of messages is likely to generate responses for each person, and can probably charge the sender for the ideal writing style recommendation.
- majormajor 11y agoI think that's against their long-term interest. For traffic to keep coming, they need either new users from good word-of-mouth from people who had good experiences, or repeat usage from people who were happy enough with their past experience even if the relationship didn't last forever. Explicitly helping people be manipulative in getting to an in-person meeting between probably-not-actually-natural-matches seems counterproductive.
- caseysoftware 11y agoI worked for a dating website years ago and you might be amazed about their long-term interests.. If you join a dating site and fail, they lose one customer. If you join a dating site and are successful, they lose two. The goal became determining good but not great matches and notify the user regularly, especially if they hadn't logged in for a while. It was basically a game of giving false hope to get them to keep their accounts active and the dollars flowing. I bailed a couple weeks after I realized this.
- squigs25 11y agoI believe this algorithm must (partially) base the sentiment decision on the first name of the target. A couple of my friends with an unusual first name did not get a result, even though I know they are on LinkedIn. Also, very common names (Dan, Matt, etc.) come up with the same generic message.
- easong 11y agoI'm extremely skeptical that this works a fraction as well as it claims. Almost all of the information it provides is astrology-like well-meaning doublespeak that applies to everyone at one point or another. There's even a name for it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect. That probably won't stop businesses from wasting truckloads of money on their own automated soothsayer, though. Edit: Make sure you consult their physical terminal before emailing that big VC! http://imgur.com/UMIlcXz http://imgur.com/UMIlcXz
- dchichkov 11y agoYes... To make a generative model that can outperform humans in a social setting? I think it is technically feasible to do basic sentiment analysis, but the generative model... sorry, I think that NLP tech is just not there yet. On the other hand, I think it is a good idea to have a sentiment analysis system in place that advices users on overly negative sentiment in their comments or e-mails. I wish there was one already integrated into YC comments and into Gmail. Potentially can make life quite a bit nicer actually. P.S. like your wording 'automated soothsayer'. Funny that the next logical step would be wasting money on 'automated soothslayers' ;)
- easong 11y agoSentiment analysis to avoid overt negativity or rudeness is a great idea. It might prevent people like me from commenting too often, and I could see some perennially-depressed Reddit/OkCupid users getting a useful heads up from it as well.
- SilasX 11y agoBut at least there's a way to test it: - Give some subjects the advice from this program, and some subjects advice from a knowledgeable co-worker of the person in question (PiQ). (Make sure they don't know which the advice is coming from.) - Find some way to measure the "success" of the subjects in question -- maybe have them and the PiQ give a subjective rating of the interactions, which should be good enough. - See if there's a significant difference between the two. If all such advice is unhelpful, or this service is no better than astrology, you'll see no difference.
- curo 11y ago> "The biggest improvement to email since spell-check." Spell checking is an indexing and comparison task. Crystal is saying that she's better than I am at social tasks. Could that be true? Maybe the Turing test passes not by machines becoming more socially intelligent but by humans becoming less so.
- rifung 11y agoJust tried this out and it seems to be pretty accurate for both me and one friend of mine. Granted that's not a big sample size, but it also has confidence levels. I wonder how it works
- barbs 11y ago> That of course is the dream implicit in all this: A button that sends the perfect email every time. Indeed, a number of artists have explored the contours of this queasy future in recent months. A browser extension by Joanne McNeil fills emails with exclamation points and smileys, automating the “emotional labor” required in today’s cheerful correspondence. Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald took these ideas a step further with Pplkpr, an app that uses biometric signals sort the real life acquaintances that invigorate you from those that aren’t worth your time. These are great. Anyone know of any other similar parody apps?
- Terr_ 11y agoYou might enjoy this site... Keep clicking "Get Started" and scroll around. http://tiffzhang.com/startup/ http://tiffzhang.com/startup/
- pippy 11y agoThis market has a lot of potential. The place I work for spends a small fortune every year on personal development focused on communication styles.
- ignoramous 11y agoI think this is an incredible idea. IMO, the next generation of high impact startups are going to bring convenience and value to the billions of people using smart but cheap computing devices (phones, for instance). And products like Crystal are exactly in line where it comes to providing a degree of convienience in inter-personal communication. Its all about starting on a problem and continuing to perfecting the solution. If a computer can teach itself to play a game (DeepMind), what's preventing it from learning about other people and their behaviour? This feels strange but in the movie Avengers, Ultron, an AI algorithm, is born with extraordinary powers that can only be described as Palantir on steroids. Palantir itself is doing amazing work and solving really hard real world problems for Enterprises. Crystal (and others like refresh.io, bright.com, relateIQ) are doing it for the end user. And its pretty evident that something like this has a massive market potential (judging by acquisitions). With the amount of data flowing in the emails, on the social networks, search engines... it must be entirely possible to judge someone with unerring accuracy (the proverbial holy-grail for advertising systems). Mining of information from these signals could help solve a variety of problems-- like helping you find a recruit, a co-founder, a roommate, a life-partner, a friend that shares interests and likes, help create communities and then expand or evolve them, teach you empathy, help you write better, help with thinking... I can see something like this being central to social networking in general. I think Palantir and other companies have demonstrated that these and other similar problems are very much solvable.
- nl 11y agoI'll just leave this here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/message-resonance.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl... Better docs: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc/mrapi/overview.shtml#overview http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl... Free while in beta....
- 1337biz 11y agoAnyone having a working account and not just getting wait-listed? Would love to see some examples for comparison, e.g. the same message tailored to Horowitz vs PG?
- petenixey 11y agoI've been using this now for a few days and it's freakishly good at its knowledge of people. You fear that it's going to be a bit astrological but then you try it on some of the people you know and it's incredibly on point (and the advice varies a lot). Very impressed.