Semi-Automated & Collaborative Online Training Module For Improving Communication Skills

TL;DR

This study introduces ROC Speak, an online platform for communication skills training that provides automated feedback and peer review, demonstrating significant improvements in users' speaking abilities over a 10-day period.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel online system that offers automated, multi-faceted feedback for communication training, with empirical evidence of its effectiveness.

Findings

Participants using ROC Speak improved their speaking skills significantly.

The system enhanced attributes like friendliness, vocal variety, and articulation.

Peer and independent ratings confirmed the improvements.

Abstract

This paper presents a description and evaluation of the ROC Speak system, a platform that allows ubiquitous access to communication skills training. ROC Speak (available at rocspeak.com) enables anyone to go to a website, record a video, and receive feedback on smile intensity, body movement, volume modulation, filler word usage, unique word usage, word cloud of the spoken words, in addition to overall assessment and subjective comments by peers. Peer comments are automatically ranked and sorted for usefulness and sentiment (i.e., positive vs. negative). We evaluated the system with a diverse group of 56 online participants for a 10-day period. Participants submitted responses to career oriented prompts every other day. The participants were randomly split into two groups: 1) treatment - full feedback from the ROC Speak system; 2) control - written feedback from online peers. When judged by peers (p<.001) and independent raters (p<.05), participants from the treatment group demonstrated statistically significant improvement in overall speaking skills rating while the control group did not. Furthermore, in terms of speaking attributes, treatment group showed an improvement in friendliness (p<.001), vocal variety (p<.05) and articulation (p<.01).