Email plugin Crystal uses data to give advice on work emails

Email plugin Crystal uses data to give advice on work emailsEmail plugin Crystal uses data to give advice on work emailsAs part of technology startups never-ending quest to automate all of our messy, personal interactions, there are now artificially-intelligent plugins promising to advise us on how to write better emails to our colleagues. Does your colleague need long, winding intros before you ask that favor - or do they prefer you to get straight to the point?First developed in 2014, and gaining wider attention now, Crystal is an application that can integrate with your calendar, LinkedIn, and inbox. It promises to have data-driven answers to behauptung kinds of murky questions. On its website, it says it analyzes public data to tell you how you can expect any given person to behave, how he or she wants to be spoken to, and perhaps more importantly, what you can expect your relationship to be like.Once youve allowed it look at your email messages and contacts, you let Crystals pr oprietary personality detection technology become part-nosy detective, part-grammar teacher to look up your public content, writing style, and sentence structures, and make judgments about what you like.Trying it outThe best way to test Crystals claims, I decided, would be to test it on myself. With some trepidation for what it would reveal, I signed up with my work email and let Crystals algorithms into my life.Culling through every public social media deutsche post dhl it could find, articles and blog posts Ive written, and the DISC Personality Assessment I took, Crystals algorithm sorted me intoone of 64 communication types adapted from personality frameworks. Crystals dossier judged that I was very social, compassionate, trustworthy and I wanteda stable environment (avoiding confrontation if possible).Although these assessments made me sound like a shelter dog looking for my forever home, they were notlage wrong. I wondered which tweet or personal blog post gave me away. I am in deed relationship-oriented, and if someone wants me to respond quickly in an email for career advice, its best to leverage interests and relationships we have in common.Crystals pro-tips for people who want to have successful emails interactions with me?Point out personal connections like common friends or interestsUse a sentence to express appreciation for her timeAdd non-essential but friendly lines like hope youre doing wellAll of these statements were true, but I was unsettled to see these interpersonal cues broken down so mechanically and transactionally.How many people using Crystal were writing non-essential lines to throw me a bone in my daily interactions?Pretty good, not perfectCrystals judgment wasnt completely right. I am definitely not a natural planner, but then again - like astrology - Crystal doesnt present its advice as hard facts. Even in its disclaimer, Crystal notes that its judgments are intended more as a guide than a factual answer Statements in the personal ity profile are not intended to be factual- they are a combination of estimated personality insights intended to provide a best guess about a persons preferred communication style.If you fork over money for a paid Crystal subscription, you can use its Email Coach extension. Through this feature, you get more concrete, real-time advice on how to draft emails to contacts as it looks up publicly available data on them to give you the best research on how to reply to them.With generational and cultural differences at play in the workplace, employees are right to worry about having their tone and meaning misunderstood in communications. There are office etiquette guides to Slack and real-time spellcheck plug-ins dedicated to helping anxious workers present their best, curated self at work.If writing networking emails to strangers makes you anxious, having Crystal on your side can feel like the boost needed to get your tone right. But as for me, its also a reminder that if you want to kno w who someone is beyond their AI-selected assessment profile and computer-assisted emails, its better to meet them face-to-face.