The other mean solar day, I followed a link to a website promising to tell me "the best style to communicate with whatsoever prospect, customer, or coworker based on their unique personality." I was skeptical–and then, once I tried it, I was a little concerned well-nigh its accuracy. How could it possibly know almost my affinity for emails containing attachments or my dislike of hyperbole? Without actually searching through my emails, at least.

I had stumbled across Crystal, a new service that analyzes publicly-available data sources to come with personality profiles for coworkers and friends, and and so recommends ways to communicate with them. If you pony up for the paid version of the service, Crystal volition as well offer real-time editing suggestions in emails, tailored to the recipient'southward personality.

Crystal was masterminded by Drew D'Agostino, the co-founder of management software company Attend.com. In the summer of 2014, he left that chore to experiment with the possibilities of using online content to gauge people'due south personalities.

"I naturally don't have a loftier emotional intelligence, and I saw a lot of email miscommunication happening," he says. "And so I started building this algorithm to find personality blazon. After a few months, it got to exist kind of scary authentic."

Hither'due south Crystal'due south basic summary of my personality:


It'south a decent representation. But y'all'll notice that Crystal'due south conviction in the answer is merely 50%. That'south based on how much data Crystal was able to find well-nigh me on the Internet.

According to D'Agostino, the information that Crystal finds is substantially what you lot'd detect by Googling somebody–visitor bios, Amazon and Yelp reviews, social media profiles, so on. Crystal weights certain sources more than others–a big block of text written on a review site gets more weight than a retweeted article, for instance.

I was surprised at the depression accurateness confidence of the score considering how much publicly-available text I write equally part of my job. "For a writer with tons of articles, in that location'south actually a lot of noise in that. It'due south stuff that's not necessarily talking nearly yourself," says D'Agostino. "That can throw information technology off, just also the algorithm isn't perfected."

Here are some of Crystal's suggestions for communicating with me, based on its personality assessment.


Some of the recommendations are spot-on, but others, like Crystal's prediction that I enjoy reading instruction manuals and dislike brevity in emails, aren't as much. Personality assessments can be improved by input from others (Crystal lets users answer questions almost others to better accuracy), but since the service has only been around for a few weeks, I dubiety that anyone else provided input for my profile. Overall, I'd charge per unit the accuracy of my contour at well-nigh 80%, which is almost the average, co-ordinate to D'Agostino.

"Nosotros run across public data as the starting point," he says.

The service falls in line with a growing number of attempt to utilise data to gauge people's advice styles. Many of these come in the form of monitoring at work. One startup, for example, is creating "sociometric badges" that listen in on conversations.

In Crystal's organisation, people tin fall into 64 "personality buckets," which borrow heavily from personality tests like DiSC. "In that location are different communication styles for different personality types, and those advice styles use email differently. Similar with people who'd put an entire email in a subject area line with no text–a lot of little things like that can be traced back to how a person'due south wired," says D'Agostino. Hence the feeling that Crystal must be delving into your e-mail athenaeum, even though it isn't.

Though the service has only been available for a brusque corporeality of time, and hasn't spent whatsoever money on marketing, it already has thousands of users. It's especially pop among salespeople, recruiters, and managers.

For at present, Crystal is focusing on electronic mail, but it volition eventually co-operative out to other kinds of online communication. "The real central going forward is getting more of a recipient-focused experience. I want people to email me in the style I similar to exist emailed, and that's not part of our product yet," says D'Agostino.