More than ever, with the increasing use of online video-conferencing solutions in daily professional interactions, public speaking skills are becoming crucial.
The aim of this research project is to obtain better insights into the best approaches allowing the practice of public speaking skills with technologically mediated tools.
To this end, we will investigate different training environments (with and without virtual audience in virtual reality) and different training approaches (e.g. modeling-based, feedback-based, simulation-based) to help users acquire, improve, and practice public speaking skills in full autonomy.
For this purpose, different research challenges will be tackled to: automatically learn, from different corpora, the multimodal cues correlated to the quality of public speaking; provide pedagogical activities rooted in coaching practice, taking a user-centered approach; provide a global evaluation of the training session as well as the specific behavioral characteristics to improve.
The project starts in February 2022