Tone indicator

A text-based marker appended to online messages to explicitly signal the intended emotional tone or communicative intent, such as /s for sarcasm, /j for joking, /gen for genuine, or /srs for serious. Tone indicators emerged from neurodivergent online communities to address the difficulty of interpreting tone in text-only communication, where facial expressions and vocal cues are absent. While valued by some for reducing ambiguity, tone indicators have limitations: they require the sender to add them, they are not universally known, and they only work in informal contexts. AI-powered alternatives that automatically analyse tone are being explored as more seamless solutions.