Voiceable - machine learning and big data for creating an intelligent technological speech coach

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

Technology of Influence AS (TOI) was registered in the spring of 2015. Today the company consists of six team members with expertise in different areas: two team members are voice/pitch coaches and experienced corporate trainers, two are PhD graduates working in research and education of voice sciences, one is an experienced systems design programmer and architect and our last member is an experienced journalist and our administrative leader. Technology of Influence (TOI) aims to develop technologies that help people maximize the impact their voice has on an audience by utilizing, and building on, research and development done in the rapidly expanding field of speech analysis. The way we use our voice is a powerful tool that strongly impacts how we are received by an audience, often more than the actual words. This is nothing new and many speakers seek help from "speech coaches" to achieve greater influence and impact when speaking. A speech coach listens to a speaker's voice to identify specific voice characteristics that are either strengths or weaknesses. In this project we will research how advances in computer audio analysis for the linguistic sciences can be applied within this field, and the objective of this project is to fully finalize a set of speech analysis technologies that reveals the impact a speaker has on his or her audience and implement these into an intelligent computer-based speech coach. The tool can then be used to reliably predict how audiences are likely to respond, which will provide speakers with advanced insight into their own speech behaviors. The platform will also consist of a wide variety of features and tools for feedback and improvement, and it will give access to unique statistics showing improvement over time.