IF YOU want me to respond to your next email, you should try adding an emoticon to it. Well, that鈥檚 the sort of thing Crystal says I like.
Crystal Knows, a start-up in Nashville, Tennessee, calls its app 鈥渢he biggest improvement to email since spellcheck鈥�. It is part of a growing suite of high-tech tools, some serious, some silly, that promise to help people talk to each other more effectively.
You tell the system who you want to contact and it then sifts through what that person has posted online, mostly on social media and what comes up in a Google search. It then devises a list of recommendations, using methods borrowed from established tests that look at the Big Five personality traits, on how to style your emails to get the best response.
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For an email to my editor, for example, Crystal suggests that I ditch the formal greetings and not bore him with anything he鈥檚 heard before. With my girlfriend, it advises some self-deprecating humour. And for people reaching out to me, it proposes adding an emoticon.
You can also choose to answer multiple-choice questions about a specific person (鈥淚f there was a conflict at work, how would he react?鈥�). The software will use your answer to tweak its overall profile of an individual.
Crystal founder thinks their algorithm can help people, particularly co-workers, strengthen their relationships with one another. 鈥淓verybody has some level of anxiety about sending email,鈥� he says. 鈥淐rystal is not helping you to be like a robot and programmatically send emails. It鈥檚 helping you to understand how people write.鈥�
鈥淭he Crystal app can help co-workers strengthen their relationships with one another鈥�
Some other tools are a bit sillier. The Emotional Labor browser extension, built by New York City writer Joanne McNeil, will embellish emails with exclamation points, smiley faces and affectionate words 鈥� a spoonful of linguistic sugar added with a single click. Distracted men can download the BroApp, a program that automatically sends their girlfriends boilerplate texts like 鈥淗ey babe, how was your day?鈥� and 鈥淢iss you鈥�.
Apps like Crystal touch on another modern problem: the sheer volume of messages we receive every day. One from the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that some workers spend up to 28 per cent of their day sorting through emails. Another study, , estimated that time their physicians wasted reading emails cost the Penn State College of Medicine $1 million. The authors urged institutions like theirs to fight back against 鈥渙ur current metastatic email culture鈥� by rethinking what emails are worth sending and whether people really want to receive them.
Research like this suggests we really need a way to contain the avalanche, perhaps with filters that are better at guessing which messages we really care about. , a firm in Stockholm, Sweden, is working on an email browser that will track users鈥� behaviour, noting which emails they ignore and which they spend time on, and then decide which messages to shunt to the top of the inbox.
, a start-up based in Chicago, offers another way to handle the internet鈥檚 information overload. Instead of having to stalk people on Google before you meet, Charlie鈥檚 artificially intelligent assistant will keep you briefed on new acquaintances. It combs through your Google calendar for upcoming meetings, scours the internet for background information on the people who will be there, and submits a one-page dossier before the meeting is set to start.
First impressions
Charlie makes it easier to make an impression on people, says co-founder Aaron Frazin. If the report mentions that a new client is a fan of the Chicago Cubs, you might find a way to casually mention baseball during the meeting. Or, if their company recently tweeted about a new product, you might remember to congratulate them on the launch.
鈥淭echnology is making communication quicker. That means we need to adapt and make sure that the beginning of the conversation is as effective as it can be,鈥� says Franzin.
He says the hardest feature for Charlie to nail is the list of people鈥檚 personal interests, which can be difficult to figure out from a handful of Facebook posts or tweets.
But as our wealth of personal data grows, so too may the programs that decide what we want to hear, and what we should say. For now, the tools that are out there may be useful to those of us who don鈥檛 have the sharpest people skills, says , an etiquette expert at Mannersmith in Boston, though she cautions that what someone puts on Facebook or Twitter may not be an accurate reflection of their personality.
鈥淟earning how people like to communicate, this is something that socially savvy people already do,鈥� she says. 鈥淏ut less emotionally astute people might find they鈥檙e able to improve.鈥�
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淣o empathy? Fake it鈥�
