email messages lost in translation?

Have you ever sent an email full of love, only to have it interpreted by the receiver as if it were full of boiling hate?  Fired off an innocuous late night note to a customer only to read a reply in the morning that would suggest you’d asked about murdering their first born?

Yep, it’s happened to all of us at some point: you read your composition one way but somewhere along the line the meaning gets totally lost in translation.

Of course, you may also have written an email whilst feeling a little hot under the collar (or, even worse, having been on the bottle!), with very similar consequences.

Well fret no more, fellow email monsters.  Allow me to introduce ToneCheck!  Launched in Beta today, ToneCheck is “an e-mail plug-in that flags sentences with words or phrases that may convey unintended emotion or tone, then helps you re-write them. Just like Spell Check… but for Tone.”

ToneCheck evaluates words and phrases for the intensity of 8 primary emotions, allowing you to make corrections and adjust the overall tone before you send the wrong message.

Available as a plugin for use with Microsoft Outlook ToneCheck is currently available as a free trial.  Further plugins and interfaces are apparently on the way.

Now then … “Dear Fishface, …”