Going up in front of a group of people of any size can be a nerve-wracking experience for some, causing them to stumble, stutter or even forget words entirely.
However, a team of U.S. engineers is looking to help with this using an artificial intelligence known as SpeechCoach.ai. In order to assist with public speaking skills, the AI is able to listen to humans speak, compares the speech to renowned speakers like Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela and offer feedback accordingly.
“Public speaking is one of the biggest challenges for engineers,” Chirag Mahapatra, co-creator of the project and engineer at Airbnb, told TechCrunch. “Most of us don’t have access to speech coaches or people to help us get better at public speaking.”
Specifically, SpeechCoach.ai will take into account factors such as:
- how fast the user is speaking
- the number of “filler” words that have been used
- context/sentiment
- grammatical errors
A demo of SpeechCoach.ai can be seen below.
To develop the AI, Mahapatra and Karthika Purushothaman used IBM’s Bluemix API to convert audio input into text for analysis. Going forward, the team says it also plans to add video functionality to SpeechCoach.ai to detect facial expressions.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Source: TechCrunch
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