Gadget Lab Podcast: Inside Textio’s Anti-Bias Bot

It’s a special episode this week, because a couple people from our regular Gadget Lab are out of the office traveling. So it’s just me in-studio. And the interview you’re about to hear is from our WIRED 25 conference late last year. It’s a conversation I had with Kieran Snyder.

Kieran is the cofounder and CEO of Textio, a Seattle-based startup that has created what Snyder calls an augmented writing platform. And it’s fascinating. We talked a lot about how Textio works, what kinds of words and phrases are biased that you might not even realize are biased, and how she envisions things like Textio being used more broadly in the workplace. All right, without any more windup, here’s Kieran Snyder from Textio.

Announcer: Please welcome Kieran Snyder in conversation with WIRED’s Lauren Goode.

LG: Thank you everybody for joining us today, for being here. And thank you to Kieran Snyder for joining us at WIRED 25.

Kieran Snyder: Thank you for having me.

LG: Just a quick intro for Kieran. Kieran is the cofounder and CEO of Textio, which we’re going to talk all about. And prior to that, you were a program manager at Microsoft for nearly a decade. Is that right?

KS: More or less.

LG: More or less. And she also has a PhD in linguistics and cognitive science. She is, I think by all definitions, a linguistics expert. And so we’re going to talk about that as well.

And I know for some of you who have been in earlier podcast tapings, you’re aware at this point that there is something like a kid carnival going on next door, thanks to Google. And so you may hear some noise as kids take their aggressions out on robots and things like that.

But that’s what we like on the Gadget Lab podcast. It just adds to the atmosphere. So thank you for your patience as we deal with the noise. So I think a good place to start would probably be to ask what is Textio? What does Textio do?

KS: Textio is an augmented writing platform. So then the next question is, what’s an augmented writing platform, right? Think of it as a word processor that is designed to tell you who’s going to respond to the things that you’re writing. So based on the patterns of language that you’re using, you may resonate more with one audience versus another.

Maybe you’re writing a job description, and you’re trying to figure out how to get the most qualified people to apply. Or maybe you are writing a message to a colleague, and you’re trying to figure out how to get them to engage and not kind of select out. But that’s what Textio is.

LG: And who are you selling that product to?

KS: We sell to businesses today, generally to leaders. So people who are involved with hiring or internal communications or HR. But it’s always into businesses, companies of all sizes.

LG: When you say companies of all sizes, what businesses specifically can you share? Some names that people might recognize?

KS: Sure. Everything from Cisco and Johnson & Johnson to Slack to NASA. We’re really excited about the NASA one. When our team got to go visit NASA onsite, they came back with NASA T-shirts. We have a lot of space nerds at the company. But really, a large range of organizations, governments, civil organizations, as well as large enterprises.

LG: I thought it might be helpful to describe for the audience what’s happening as they’re using Textio’s software. So you’re in this augmented writing platform. And one of the examples that we’ve talked about before, because Kieran was also in an issue of WIRED earlier this year, is you’re a hiring manager or recruiter and you’re typing something up and you use a word like, “I’m looking for a ninja,” or “I’m looking for a rock star.”

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