Expressive, boisterous, and unpretentious

Expressive, boisterous, and unpretentious - not sure they would be the first words that would come to mind if I were asked to describe myself, but according to IBM Watson's Personality Insights Demonstration, based on a text analysis of my post about text messaging earlier this week, those are the most accurate descriptors.

It is a fun tool and exercise to try, (you can play along with any of your, or someone else's writing samples here). Simply paste in a block of text, click on 'Analyze', and Watson will let you know how the text sample equates to personality elements like openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and more.

The tool even generates a neat narrative explaining the person behind the text sample, who knew that 'My choices are driven by a desire for modernity'. That is pretty accurate, I think. Well maybe. 

What's the point of the tool, if not just for a bit of fun?

According to IBM -

The IBM Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to infer cognitive and social characteristics, including Big Five, Values, and Needs, from communications that the user makes available, such as email, text messages, tweets, forum posts, and more. By deriving cognitive and social preferences, the service helps users to understand, connect to, and communicate with other people on a more personalized level.

Better understanding, ability to connect with others, and to enable improved interpersonal communications all sound like pretty worthy goals, so at least I am interested in any technological means to assist us humans with these challenges.

Oh, one more thing, the Watson Personality Insights tool also generates a neat looking graphical analysis of the writer's personality - here is mine from the aforementioned post about text messaging.

Like I said, really neat. Although from the looks of the chart I probably need to work on my 'self-transcendence' a little bit. Whatever that means.

You can take the IBM Watson Personality Insights tool out for a spin here, and if you do, let me know what you think.