Interesting article about a (possibly) powerful tool for recruiters overseas seeking to engage American candidates. I wonder if the reverse is also being planned for those American recruiters looking for talent overseas?
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Whitesmoke

Perhaps this is a familiar situation. Your spoken English is goodâ€â€?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 Word, WhiteSmoke performs a black art known as “text enrichment.”

In effect, the software parses your documentsâ€â€?including e-mails, letters, and even legal contractsâ€â€?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.

READ: Software That Will This Sentence Fix .

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