If it’s your birthday, Mother’s Day or some other significant occasion, it’s likely you’ll receive a barrage of text messages, emails and calls. Even if it’s not a special day, between your friends, significant other and boss, there’s probably a fair amount of action on your phone.
Deep Focus summarizes who has contacted you and lets you know how important that information is based on the emotions it has identified in the email, voicemail, text message, Facebook message, etc. From there, Deep Focus marks the message as either important or not important.
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“It’s hard to know what’s important and what’s not,” Jeff Rothkirch, a member of the Deep Focus team, told me. That’s why he and Quan Zhou tapped into Twilio’s messaging API to serve as a middle-person and IBM Watson’s API to determine what you should be notified about.
The app works in real time, and you can see how it works by texting 470-823-7643. I sent Jeff a couple of texts to see how well it really worked. When I texted, “I am so angry with you,” Deep Focus marked the message as important. When I texted, “Ahhhhhh heheh,” Deep Focus marked it as not important. Makes sense! The emotion indicator was also spot-on, recognizing that my “important” message included a fair amount of anger and my “unimportant” message had some fear in it.
Rothkirch and Zhou aren’t totally sure they’ll make it available to the public, but my fingers are crossed that they do. Check out the presentation below.