Live Sentiment: What India Is Actually Saying About You, Right Now
Every tool on PublicSentiment so far has answered one question: "if I publish this, how likely is backlash?" That's a prediction, built from patterns in the text itself. It's useful before you publish. But it can't tell you what's already happening in the world around a brand, a campaign, or a public figure today. Live Sentiment closes that gap — it reads current news coverage and tells you the real, current public mood, with sources.
A prediction tool and a monitoring tool are different jobs
The core PublicSentiment analyzer scores a script, caption, or policy draft you paste in, using a purpose-built rule engine tuned to India's recurring controversy fault lines — religion, caste, region, gender, politics. It never looks outside your text. That's exactly right for its job: catching risk before something goes public.
Live Sentiment is a different tool for a different moment. Instead of asking "will this cause backlash," you ask "what is currently being said about this brand / person / policy / campaign, in the actual news." It doesn't analyze a draft — it goes and looks at what's really out there right now.
How it actually works
When you enter a topic, Live Sentiment runs a live, grounded web search against recent news coverage — not a static database, and not the language model's own training knowledge, which would go stale immediately. It then reads what it finds and produces a sentiment score, a plain-English summary of the current mood, the specific themes driving positive or negative coverage, and the actual source articles it read, with links.
Because it's reading real coverage instead of guessing, the result changes as the news does. Search the same topic next week and, if something has shifted, the score and themes will reflect that.
When to reach for it
A few situations where "what is the internet already saying" matters more than "what might people think":
- Before a press statement or PR response — know the current tone you're walking into, not the tone from three weeks ago.
- Monitoring a brand or campaign after launch, to catch a shift in coverage early instead of finding out from a crisis call.
- Checking a public figure or spokesperson's current standing before booking them for an event or endorsement.
- Deciding whether a topic is currently "hot" enough that even neutral content about it carries elevated risk.
What it isn't
Live Sentiment reflects how much news coverage exists and its tone — it isn't a full social-listening tool pulling in every WhatsApp forward, comment section, and regional-language post. Topics with limited recent English/Hindi news coverage will come back with a thinner result, and that's a real limitation worth knowing rather than a bug: it's a live news-sentiment check, not an all-seeing dashboard.
It's currently a Pro-plan feature, since each check runs live search and analysis rather than a free local computation.
Frequently asked questions
What is Live Sentiment?
Live Sentiment is a PublicSentiment feature that searches current news coverage for a brand, person, campaign, or topic and reports the real, current public sentiment — a score, a plain-English summary, the themes driving that sentiment, and links to the actual source articles.
How is Live Sentiment different from the main risk analyzer?
The main analyzer scores text you paste in — a script, speech, or ad — to predict how it might be received before you publish it. Live Sentiment doesn't analyze your text at all; it searches live news for a topic and reports what's already being said about it in the real world today.
Where does the data come from?
Each check runs a live, grounded web search against recent news coverage at the moment you ask, then summarizes what it finds. It is not pulled from a static database and does not rely on a language model's memorized training data, which would go stale immediately — every result reflects genuinely current search results, with linked sources you can verify yourself.
Why does a well-known topic sometimes show limited results?
Live Sentiment reflects how much recent English/Hindi news coverage actually exists for that specific topic. A niche or very recent topic may simply not have much written about it yet — that shows up as a thinner result, which is an honest reflection of current coverage volume rather than a tool failure.
Is Live Sentiment available on the free trial?
No — it's a Pro-plan feature. Unlike the core analyzer's rule-based scoring, each Live Sentiment check runs a live search and analysis, so it's gated the same way as Compare Mode and the Backlash Simulator.
Can I use it to check my own brand or content?
Yes — search your brand, product, campaign name, or your own public name to see current coverage and sentiment, the same way you'd search any other topic.
Check your own content before you post it
Paste a script, speech, or campaign brief into PublicSentiment and get a controversy risk score in seconds.
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