What people are saying...

The team at Pluribo are definitely onto something here. With all the information coming at us now and in the near future, we are going to need all the heuristic help we can get!

I’m really impressed with Pluribo, a Firefox plug-in that summarizes Amazon reviews... If you have the budget, you might want to contact them about developing similar technology for your site’s reviews or product descriptions

A start-up called Pluribo.com, launched in June, mines many hundreds of conflicting online reviews of Amazon’s electronic products and delivers its own computer-generated judgments in pithy prose. The site’s two- to four-sentence summaries can be quirky—for instance, the software says it has “scruples” with a particular hard drive—but its grammar often beats that of the human reviewers.

When I used Pluribo, I found the breadth of devices that the service supported was pretty large--so even though the service is new, it's definitely useful. The summaries really do read as though they were written by people and not computers, which makes it that much more helpful when it comes to making a buying decision. Similarly, the ability to look at aggregate stats for reviews and competing products just by hovering over the review is a feature that I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon makes its own in the future. Pluribo has a lot of promise, and in the end could very well mean that you get an accurate summary of all of a product's customer reviews without having to read them all yourself.

Pluribo is on to something with this summarization engine. The web is increasingly pummeling its visitors with too much information, and technology like this has the potential to give users a birds-eye view of product reviews, travel recommendations, and even large bodies of factual information.

I gave it a spin on several electronics I own, and it came up with fantastic results. One of them in particular, an iPod nano, was one of the better examples of how the tool can be useful. In its analysis, it showed that one of the most reoccurring user complaints was scratching, while nearly everyone else raved over its features and overall design. Not a bad take considering it parsed over 700 reviews in just a few seconds. Better yet, I didn't have to read any of them.

I admit to being a compulsive researcher. I'd read 100s of Amazon and other reviews before making a big purchase decision. This tool will help me figure out when to dive in and do more research -- or just trust the wisdom of the crowds. Totally reminds me of seeing Oracle ConText for the first time -- an artificially intelligent text summarizer that would digest arbitrary text documents and spit out summaries as long as you wanted them (using a cool on-screen slider). This is even more useful.

This is an unbelievable time saver! Rather than having to read a page full of rambling reviews, I love being able to just read a short summary. This really changes the way I use Amazon.