CNet: Saygent is a company to help businesses mine sentiments of their customers or potential customers. The product will be a partly automated voice survey tool. Clients will create survey questions and come up with a list of desired respondents, and then a machine will poll these people (via phone, unfortunately) and collect their voice responses. It will take the answers it gets and farm them out, via Mechanical Turk, to a panel of humans who will determine the sentiment of the respondents, as well as other factors that can’t easily be determined by transcripts of responses.
Getting an excitement (or anger, or frustration, etc) level on responses is both more valuable in marketing surveys and less expensive. All the human listeners have to do for Saygent is determine tone, not spend time transcribing.
Saygent: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it [CNet]