Software That Will This Sentence Fix

Israel-based WhiteSmoke has devised a program that, by checking against a vast database, makes English text more fluent. Its top market? The U.S.

by Neal Sandler

Perhaps this is a familiar situation. Your spoken English is good—heck, you use it every day at the office. But it's not your native tongue, and every time you have to write an important e-mail or business letter in English, you worry that you might make an embarrassing mistake. Worse, a serious misuse could alter the meaning of your prose, potentially invalidating a contract or harming a business relationship.

Help is on the way. An Israeli software company called WhiteSmoke has devised a software tool that uses artificial intelligence to scan written English text and suggest ways to make it stronger, clearer, and more fluent. Far more than just a spelling and grammar checker, like the ones built into Microsoft (MSFT) Word, WhiteSmoke performs a black art known as "text enrichment."

In effect, the software parses your documents—including e-mails, letters, and even legal contracts—against a vast database of commonly accepted usage patterns to ensure that the writing is as good as possible. "English is the lingua franca of globalization, and our vision is to give everyone a level playing field in making a good first impression," says Hilla Ovil-Brenner, the 32-year-old chief executive and co-founder of WhiteSmoke.

There's apparently plenty of demand for that. Privately-held WhiteSmoke won't reveal details of its financial results, but says that it booked revenues of "several million" dollars in 2006, the first year the software went on sale. It expects to double that in 2007. Surprisingly, WhiteSmoke's No. 1 market is the U.S., which accounts for more than half of revenues. Now the company is launching an aggressive effort to penetrate China and India, where demand for English text enrichment could be even higher.

Better Writing Through Technology

Indeed, it was globalization and the predominance of English on the Web that prompted the idea for WhiteSmoke. (The name derives from the Native American practice of communicating via smoke signals.) Ovil-Brenner, who was born in Israel and raised in South Africa, says her father, a heart surgeon, complained to her a few years ago about the poor quality of the English in e-mails he received from foreign colleagues. Ovil-Brenner decided to tackle the problem with her husband, Liran Brenner, a computer engineer who worked for five years at Israeli instant-messaging software pioneer ICQ.

Working out of a second-floor Tel Aviv apartment converted into an office, they spent two years consulting with linguistic experts and teachers from the English-speaking world. What they developed was a technology that reads, classifies, and stores millions of English-language documents, ranging from government archives to newspapers like The New York Times and The Times of London. "The trick was devising algorithms capable of scanning through the masses of text to analyze syntax and then feed it into our database," says Brenner, who serves as the company's chief technical officer.

This vast repository of real-world examples provides the template against which writing samples are compared. When users ask WhiteSmoke to analyze a letter or e-mail they have written, they're provided with precise suggestions for improvement based on relevant content and context. The company has patented its concept of language enrichment, as well as its sophisticated text-comprehension engine.

Early Adopters Impressed

"WhiteSmoke's solution differs from existing ones that process on a word-by-word basis because the software actually understands and interprets the meaning of a text," says Yair Goldfinger, the 36-year-old co-developer of ICQ, who has invested an undisclosed amount in WhiteSmoke. (ICQ was acquired by AOL (TWX) almost a decade ago for $400 million.) WhiteSmoke won't reveal the names of its other U.S. and Israeli investors nor the amount it has raised. The company's staff now numbers 25, including a full-time linguist.