With the advent of social media customers today have multiple channels to express how they feel about a product or service. But how can companies efficiently capture all such comments to derive overall trends and meanings? Etuma, a Finnish start-up, has built a text analysis engine that collects feedback (mainly from social media), breaks every text-based customer message into sentences and creates discussion topics based on the extracted meanings. The topics are then categorized into two types: problematic topics that need to be addressed and admiring topics that can be used for selling and marketing communications. The results are visualized and presented in real-time.

While there a few other companies that provide a similar service (ClaraBridge, Attensity, Lexalytics), Etuma's critical point of difference is catering for 10 European languages instead of only English. Namely: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Finnish.

Text analysis has the same quality in every language. In other words, if a company is getting feedback in English, French and Norwegian, Etuma can capture those comments, analyze them and present results in English. You can see how valuable that type of feature is in the multilingual European environment.

What is more, text analytics is a growing industry. The amount of feedback customers send is rapidly growing, making it hard for large entreprerises to manage the flow by themselves. Matti Airas, CEO, also points out that there is very little competition in the multilingual customer feedback market, which puts Etuma in a particularly good position.

The price of the service is based on the feedback volume and featire sets. There are three types of subscription models, though their prices are not specified. Given that Etuma targets large entreprerises, one can only guess that the price for the service is quite substantial.

Etuma started operations in May this year. The company has a few customers but is currently in negotiations with big domestic and international companies. Etuma is a spin-off from Connexor, a long-established expert in liguistics and software technologies. Thus, people behind Etuma combine technical talent with in-depth understanding of linguistics in various languages.

Image by Jurgen Appelo

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marcos July 11, 2011

Hi,

speaking for Clarabridge, I would like note that we do provide Full NLP support and Sentiment analysis for english, spanish, french and portugese (3-4 more language within the next few quarters). In addition we can provide limited statistical analysis of any other language, including left to right. You might want to clarify what exactly is meant by "support" of other languages, as the definitions can vary.

Cheers,
marcos

Seth Grimes July 11, 2011

Anna, to be fair, none of the competing products you cite do sentiment analysis only in English. ClaraBridge and Lexalytics also support French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and Attensity supports (I believe) French, Spanish, and German. Further, other competing products support a variety of languages so multi-lingual support isn't unique to Etuma.

On this subject, I'll mention that we'll have a couple of talks focusing on multi-lingual sentiment analysis at the November 9 Sentiment Analysis Symposium (http://sentimentsymposium.com) in San Francisco.

Seth, http://twitter.com/sethgrimes

Anna Bessonova July 14, 2011

Dear Seth and Marcos,

Thank you for clarifying those points about Etuma's comeptitors.

Anna.