Opinion Mining

More and more businesses are not only interested in what their customers are buying but also how they feel about their purchases. While customer surveys can report what people say explicitly, a new method called sentiment analysis is designed to implicitly quantify customer attitudes based on what they say or write.

These techniques employ natural language processing (NLP) – a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that uses computational linguistics to understand and process language. Simple forms include chatbots, voice assistants (“Hey, Alexa”), and negative-to-positive language scoring.

Today, these tools analyze many other aspects of speech, including the words used, length of time, speed, loudness, and variations in sentiment at different phases of a call. Although several tech companies have developed platforms for sentiment analysis, Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently packaged these tools in an application programming interface (API) for transcribing audio recordings. It offers the service for incorporation into enterprise dashboards for a per-minute fee based on volume.

For information: Amazon Web Services; website: https://aws.amazon.com/