A French company called Spotter has created an algorithm-based analytics software to detect sarcasm in online comments. It’s a shame internet sarcasm is in such short supply, they had to invent software to track it down.

Spotter costs a minimum of £1,000 a month (what a deal!), for clients such as the UK’s Home Office, EU Commission and Dubai Courts, according to a report from the BBC. Why the government and customer service industries think anyone would post sarcastic things about them is beyond us.

“One of our clients is Air France. If someone has a delayed flight, they will tweet, ‘Thanks Air France for getting us into London two hours late’—obviously they are not actually thanking them,” said UK sales director Richard May. (Thank you for that explanation, May.)

The software employs a combination of linguistics, semantics and heuristics to create algorithms that generate reports about a company’s reputation online. The company claims it can detect sentiment with a 80% accuracy rate, and discern commenters’ tones in twenty-nine different languages including Chinese, Russian and Arabic.

Yeah, right, says Simon Collister, a social media and public relations lecturer at the London College of Communication, who asserts that sarcasm is “so dependent on context and human languages” it would be nearly impossible to detect tone without human involvement. As though they have thought of this already, Spotter has hired human backup, just in case the software’s sarcasm count ever drops.

Melville House would consider using the software if there were any indication its readers had a snarky sense of humor.