[Someone1234]

Gathering what people are saying is relatively easy. Figuring out the meaning accurately is extremely difficult, and as you add longer text the difficulty grows.

Something like Siri wasn't developed in a void, the technology behind it took quite a long time, with many millions of dollars, and that is only aimed at "understanding" short sentences.

What you're asking for might cost a pretty penny to develop, it isn't just a "one guy in a basement for a long weekend" type of concept, it is a legitimately hard Computer Science problem with no easy outs.

If you were able to scan social media and extract WHAT people are talking about then it is definitely a monetizable idea. However from zero through to profit is a very long ride.

Maybe contact the NSA and try to negotiate re-using their in-house technology?

[kylex]

I really appreciate the lengthy response, it really means a lot and it helps a lot getting insight from the tech world. It definitely is not an easy thing to do, but then what is right?

I have found some open source algorithms that claim to have a decent amount of accuracy, though decent isn't enough it may be a start. What is your opinion?

Going as far as contacting the NSA, I don't know how willing they are in sharing their technology. I know they do work with private corporations which benefit both parties, I guess it would be worth a shot. That would be an interesting approach.

How long do you think it would take to build something like this? Even if we could just get sentiment values ie. Positive / neutral / Negative comments, that would be a great start and I believe much simpler.

[soneca]

I do have good advice on how to find a tech co-founder, but this is the hard kind of idea for you to start as a non-tech. You would need a top level engineer on a niche domain. If he/she decide to do it, the tech challenge would be so much harder than the non-tech challenge, that he/she wouldn't need you at all as a co-founder.

I think you should pursue more a not so high tech dependant idea, like: Airbnb, Groupon, Yelp, this sort of thing.

This might apply to you: http://xkcd.com/1425/

EDIT: I think the NSA part was just a joke.

[Someone1234]

> How long do you think it would take to build something like this?

If you were starting from complete scratch, 15 years (assuming 1-2 people). But the reality is you aren't starting from complete scratch because the academic community in particular (and previous technology) have a great deal of prior work in this specific area.

So maybe 3 years until you have "something basic" and then 5 years until it is really profitable (presuming its accuracy rises year upon year). That's if you exploit all academic work you can find and try to build on existing technology as much as possible.

You could maybe do it in about 1.5 years with a large team.