As residents of Philadelphia’s innovative neighborhood, we all come across a profusion of texts; content, that provokes an emotional response; content, that we love reading while sipping our favorite cup of chai tea latte. But often, we also come across dull and uneventful content, even from reputed publishers, which just fails to strike an emotional cord with the readers. Boost Linguistics, a startup from Drexel University, aims just to change that.
Essentially a communications company, Boost Linguistics presents a content editing software, powered by Machine Learning and Deep Learning technology, which helps identify emotional content in a piece of text and suggests changes based on user’s target emotional outreach. Co-Founded by Ethan Bresnahan and his team mates Alexandra Dodson and Jeff Nowak, Boost aims to help content marketers reach out to their target audience in a compelling and efficient way. This could be helpful to companies looking to evoke trust, excitement, or other emotions with their product descriptions and advertisements. Advised by renowned marketing specialists Michael Brenner and Evan Hosie, the team has been deploying a mix of artificial intelligence and marketing techniques to further improve the accuracy of the feedback provided by their software.
The Philly startup was founded by a team of students in a marketing class at Drexel University, while working on a global competition for the state department to reduce violent extremist efforts on social media. After over 1,000 pages of research, the team came up with four emotional identifiers – joy, anger, fear, and disgust – that might make someone a subject of an extremist message on social media. And with those emotional identifiers, Boost Linguistics was born.
Built at Drexel University’s own startup incubator called the Baiada Institute for Entrepreneurship, Boost Linguistics has been winning various business pitch competitions across University City, including Baiada Institute’s Business Model Competition, raising over $24,000 in the process. The full fledged software, to be released later this July, will help writers and editors by suggesting changes to their existing content, thereby boosting their reach in the process. A free trial of the beta version is available on their webpage.
To know more about Boost Linguistics, click here.
The University City Post 