Published on March 6th, 2017 | by Sunit Nandi

The Review Index: making everyday buying decisions easier with deep learning

Introduction

TheReviewIndex is a nifty web app that helps simplify the online gadget research process by bringing together reviews from various different sources on the internet and presenting the aggregate opinion of millions of users, as an easy-to-read feature-wise summary scorecard.

What is TheReviewIndex?

Before buying electronics, most of us look for reviews online because we don’t want to end up with an expensive purchase that is of low quality and/or does not meet our needs perfectly. With ever increasing unstructured, opinionated content (in the form of blogs, videos, user and expert reviews), what should be a simple look up turns out to be a very tedious affair. It is impossible for an individual to read through, interpret a significant amount of this data, and yet make a well informed purchase decision. If we read few sources due to lack of time, it’s quite likely that we would end up with an nonoptimal decision.

Typical problems for the average consumer looking to research products online include –

too many choices and sites with too much content
differentiating genuine content from spam
dealing with disparity in opinion

For the above reasons, the process of online research and decision making becomes extremely tedious and overwhelming. TheReviewIndex simplifies this process not just by bringing together all specs, price, reviews under one roof, but also by also summarizing reviews for the end user. Not only that, TheReviewIndex provides a search engine that can be used to find products based on factors that are important to you.

What is the basic product/service are TheReviewIndex offering?

TheReviewIndex presents a unified, unbiased, feature-wise summary scorecard of the aggregate opinion to the end user, by mining reviews collected from different sources of internet.

Their product heavily leverages cutting edge machine learning algorithms and artificial neural networks to –

aggregate, reconcile reviews from various relevant, popular sources
identify and remove spam / fraudulent content
detect fine grained topics and sentiment in the reviews
bring out the pros/cons

Users can also discover the right products for their high level requirements with the search engine of TheReviewIndex and finally compare prices across all stores to conclude the decision making process.

Their product/service USP?

TheReviewIndex discovers topics in reviews and the corresponding sentiment by heavily leverage artificial neural networks and machine learning. Their primary USP is their focus on applying cutting edge tech to derive crucial insights from millions of unstructured reviews, thereby exposing out summarizies, pros/cons and a search engine.

Current status and future goals?

They have recently launched a public beta with a consumer-facing (mobile friendly) website thereviewindex.com, with six categories – Mobiles, Speakers, Televisions, Routers, Microwaves, Washing Machines – for Indian consumers. The search engine enables users to discover the right products for their high level requirements. A user can also drill deeper to view the feature-wise rating, summary, pros/cons, user comment snippets (all derived from reviews) and finally compare prices across all stores to conclude the decision making process.

Over the course of next couple of months, they plan to expand to include all major appliances and electronics.

Conclusion

TheReviewIndex is a very fruitful destination for the users who want to make informed decisions leveraging reviews and opinions across the web. As a bonus, users also get specs and price from across online stores for quick comparison.

Tags: buying, decisions, deep learning, easier, everyday, index, neural network, NLP

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.