I noticed a Press Release today, care of Google Alerts, for  Attensity text analytics suite that collects sentiment information without any human intervention/tagging - and I find that interesting and perhaps very useful. 

In Travelocity Employs Attensity’s Text Analytics Software Applications for Automated Customer Feedback Analysis

"..Attensity VoC employs the company’s patented Exhaustive Extraction™ technology to automatically identify facts, opinions, requests, trends and trouble spots from the unstructured text of survey responses, service notes, email messages, website forums, blog entries, news articles and other customer communications. "

"..Unlike programs that require manual tagging, sorting, classifying or other upfront effort Attensity VoC automatically extracts valuable data from written feedback to provide analysts and managers deeper insights into customer satisfaction, sentiment and loyalty. Attensity VoC can also reveal specific product and service issues, reactions to marketing and public relations efforts, and even buying signals. The automated application provides early warnings on customer “cries for help” as well as performs analysis on and produces insight for Net Promoter® Score “detractor” and “promoter” issues and requirements. "

If Attensity text analytics suite really does all of the above, well, it would be much superior to what I've seen in terms of the insight or information we get out of Survey data now.

"..“Large enterprises are flooded with unstructured data that contains information essential to making prudent business decisions,” Esteban Kolsky, Gartner’s research director for CRM, said. “One of the fundamental benefits of text analytics is that it affords organizations a much deeper understanding of business issues than business intelligence applications offer alone.”

Maybe I'll get a chance to see Attensity text analytics in action one of these days.