Google Glass Update: Tech Acessory to Oust Public Speaking Phobia With “Rehma” Software

A group of researchers have developed software that would facilitate users to improve their public speaking skills by means of a Google Glass. The software is built to provide real-time feedback inputs to the speaker regarding the tone, pitch and other speech related dimensions to the user.

Smart glasses are installed with intelligent user interface called Rehma that has the ability to record speech, transmit audio to the server to automatically analyze the volume and speaking rate, and then present the data to the speaker in real time. This feedback allows a speaker to adjust the volume and speaking rate or continue as before.

However, some researchers at the University of Rochester have found some errors in the working of the software. Since the feedback would be real-time, there would be an overlapping in the speech of the person and the feedback output by the software. This overlapping would pave way for abrupt pauses, or unwanted disturbances in the course of delivery of the speech.

"A significant enough distraction can introduce unnatural behaviours, such as stuttering or awkward pausing. Secondly, the head mounted display is positioned near the eye, which might cause inadvertent attention shifts", the researchers reported.

Iftekhar Tanveer, the lead author of the research paper answered the query raised.

The authors conducted a survey, by testing the software on 30 speakers and later evaluated different opinions of delivering the feedback.

By considering the heterogeneous opinions of the software, the delivering feedback in every 20 seconds in the form of words was deemed the most successful by most of the test users.

"We wanted to check if the speaker looking at the feedback appearing on the glasses would be distracting to the audience. We also wanted the audience to rate if the person appeared spontaneous, paused too much, used too many filler words and maintained good eye contact under the three conditions: word feedback, continuous feedback, and no feedback," said Ehsan Hoque, assistant professor of computer science and senior author of the paper.

However, on an overall note, this feature would be of a significant utility to the users.