Artificial Intelligence Creates Personality-Targeted Email
Source: Jennifer Golbeck Ph.D.

Have you ever wondered how to craft the perfect email? What's the right subject line? Should you open with some personal small talk or get right to the point? How long should it be? Of course, the answers depend on who are you are emailing, and if you don't know that person well, it's hard to make the right choice.

But a new tool, Crystal, is an artificial intelligence application that uses social media data about your recipient to discover their personality traits and Crystal uses that to help you craft a personalized email.

Here's an example email to Mark Cuban that Crystal shows as a demonstration. The original message read:

Dear Mark,

I'm afraid I won't be able make it this Friday. It would be great if we could reschedule for next week.

Let me know what time works for you!

Thanks,
Drew

Crystal responds, saying that Mark will respond if you make the message shorter, and offers suggestions for how to shorten it.
Jennifer Golbeck
Source: Jennifer Golbeck

The revised message reads:

Mark,

I won't be able to make it this Friday. Can we reschedule for next Tuesday?

Drew

The Crystal team has a personality-detection algorithm that they use to analyze the recipient, and that is combined with artificial intelligence that analyzes your message. They claim to have unique personality profiles for anyone who has an online presence - social media, blogs, etc. Basically, if you're online, Crystal knows about you and can help target a message toward you.

They tout the application as the next best thing since spell check. On one hand, it can be helpful to know the most effective way to communicate with people. On the other hand, customizing our messages like suggested above strips our own personality out of our communication.

So is this the future of human interaction, where everything we say to each other is mediated by artificial intelligence that analyzes what we've done to optimize our interactions? Will that make things more efficient, or more bland as our own quirks and use of language is modified to meet others' preferences? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

You can try Crystal for yourself at https://www.crystalknows.com (link is external) or check out their demo gif here: