The Text Frontier - Text mining, voice mining and unstructured data analysis

While at a customer site last week, I presented our text analytics capabilities (text mining, content categorization, sentiment and crawling). Before the meeting proper, one attendee admitted that he wasn’t a text analytics believer.

I guess he was warning me - not to wave my hands vaguely referring to some "higher power" of fancy math and linguistics. At 30k feet in the air (the return flight home), I realized my missed opportunity.

I wish I'd casually explained to him, how the car he is driving today is safer today thanks to text analytics. It means a lot to me that text analytics makes such a difference in people’s lives – even if they don’t realize it or "believe".

Over time the dismissive "yeah right" doubters will see the obvious. Artificial Intelligence and Text Analytics are due respect today as Science rather than Sci Fi entertainment

All that said, I expect that our Text Frontier followers are already believers, so my blog post might be in vain. You may have felt the rush of adrenaline when discovering the treasure of a rare "Ah-Ha moment" when insights are found buried in text. Let's get creative and brainstorm how to "evangelize" others and bring them into the fold.

Gradually people are taking notice -- our profession is progressing and earning trust. Future posts here will highlight customer success stories SAS and Teragram have documented. Please drop a comment to our blog here and share any TM related jokes or favorite one liners that you use to turn heads to build curiosity over this field of analytics. Better yet -- prove it with your own innovative implementation at your office. Seeing is Believing!