Created by Jigsaw, an incubator within Alphabet, Perspective aims to give an affordable, automated way for websites to manage and maintain a civil tone in their their comment sections.
The tool lets the website owner define a “toxicity” limit for comments that should be eliminated, allowing customisation based on the publisher’s preference. Moreover, the system will use machine learning and improve the more it is used.
Although the automated system will never reach a 100% accuracy, the goal is to improve the quality of comments to the level that people are no more put off from participating in the discussion, Lucas Dixon, one of the research scientists behind Perspective said to Fortune.
The New York Times and Wikipedia have been testing Perspective, and as of today, anyone can request access to the tool’s API. According to VentureBeat, Jigsaw aims to expand the tool to cover also other languages than English over the next year.