• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 27, 2014

Bing and Fox News teamed up again to record real-time audience sentiment about President Obama's State of the Union address, allowing viewers to express opinions about the speech via smartphone, PC or tablet.

Real-time data and sentiment analyses will allow Bing Pulse to generate graphs that analyze viewer's views. It will highlight the comments in the address generating the most votes. The "intensity score" will identify key moments in the address. Last year's turnout received 12.9 million votes during the State of the Union. Live results were also shown on FNC.

Viewers will have an opportunity to give real-time feedback on a variety of issue, like education, healthcare and the economy. "It's about as close to democracy as you can get," said Josh Gottheimer, general manager of strategic and special projects at Microsoft.

Most people tuning in to watch the address and hear GOP responses have strong opinions on what's being said. "Hopefully, after we process the more than 12.9 million votes, the government will listen," Gottheimer said. "It's not just a 10-person focus group. This is real-time feedback from millions of people."

Bing owns the sentiment data, but it's not exactly clear what the engine plans to do with the information other than provide insight into the nation's political, education and economic views. Or, whether the information will integrate into local, targeted advertising campaigns.

Microsoft added a new feature this year on the site to analyze real-time reaction from the effort, along with poll questions about some of the key topics in the speeches and a live feed of social conversations on Twitter so people can see how leading political pundits reacted. Fox will make available more news and analysis on its site.

Viewers have five choices to characterize how they are feeling about what they hear: strongly agree, somewhat agree, neutral, somewhat disagree and strongly disagree. The live count of the number of votes becomes a line graph of how users react to the State of the Union, as well as the Republican response throughout both speeches, which is visible on the television screen on FNC. It lets people share their reaction to the speech with a vote every five seconds.