Semi-Automated & Collaborative Online Training Module For Improving Communication Skills
This work addresses the need for accessible and effective communication training for a general audience, offering a semi-automated solution that shows measurable gains over traditional peer feedback methods.
The paper tackles the problem of improving communication skills by developing and evaluating the ROC Speak system, an online platform that provides automated and peer feedback on video-recorded speeches, resulting in statistically significant improvements in overall speaking skills and specific attributes like friendliness, vocal variety, and articulation for the treatment group compared to a control group.
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).