Rhema

Abstract

A large number of people rate public speaking as their top fear. What if these individuals were given an intelligent interface that provides live feedback on their speaking skills? In this paper, we present Rhema, an intelligent user interface for Google Glass to help people with public speaking. The interface automatically detects the speaker's volume and speaking rate in real time and provides feedback during the actual delivery of speech. While designing the interface, we experimented with two different strategies of information delivery: 1) Continuous streams of information, and 2) Sparse delivery of recommendation. We evaluated our interface with 30 native English speakers. Each participant presented three speeches (avg. duration 3 minutes) with 2 different feedback strategies (continuous, sparse) and a baseline (no feeback) in a random order. The participants were significantly more pleased (p < 0.05) with their speech while using the sparse feedback strategy over the continuous one and no feedback.

REsCUE

“…Based on the methods to understand human nonverbal behavior in real-time, some studies have proposed systems to provide real-time feedback on social interactions [17,40,43,44,52,56,58]. For example, Rhema [56] is designed to help people with public presentations by providing feedback in real-time via Google Glass based on a speaker's volume and speaking rate. Logue [17] addressed a similar situation by providing feedback via head-mounted display based on body energy and openness calculated from hand positions.…”

The added benefit of an extra practice session in virtual reality on the development of presentation skills: A randomized control trial

“…VR simulations are defined as “interactive digital learning environments that imitate a real‐life process or situation” (Merchant, Goetz, Cifuentes, Keeney‐Kennicutt, & Davis, 2014, p. 30). VR has been used as part of a therapy for social anxiety (Powers & Emmelkamp, 2008), to increase public speaking skills (Batrinca, Stratou, Shapiro, Morency, & Scherer, 2013; Tanveer, Lin, & Hoque, 2015) and to treat PSA (e.g., Slater, Pertaub, Barker, & Clark, 2006; Wörtwein, Morency, & Scherer, 2015). Presentation skills training in VR can be used to improve eye contact and reduce pauses of anxious students (Wörtwein et al, 2015).…”

Controlled evaluation of a multimodal system to improve oral presentation skills in a real learning setting

“…The answers are generally positive. It is important to note that some studies (Schneider et al ., 2015; Tanveer et al ., 2015; Trinh et al ., 2017) use the survey to compare different types of feedback interfaces between the tools. These surveys have only been conducted in laboratory settings.…”

“…Only three studies have tried to establish the actual effectiveness with different levels of success. Tanveer, Lin, & Hoque (2015) were the first to evaluate their system, Rhema. Their study consisted of a laboratory‐based controlled experiment where 30 recruited participants were assigned to both control and intervention conditions in random order.…”