For many people, one of the most terrifying things they may have to do in their lives is to speak in front of an audience. That's certainly true of many students in the world. Today, Microsoft has announced a new feature in its Teams for Education service that's now generally available worldwide that's designed to help improve public speaking for students.
In a blog post, Microsoft says the new feature is called Speaker Progress. It uses AI-based features to coach students on their public speaking skills and also offers feedback on their work.
Teachers can open up Teams for Education and then enter Teams Assignments to begin setting up the Speaker Assignments options. Once that's done, students can start the Speaker Assignment and get AI-based real-time feedback on their efforts.
Speaker Progress can monitor several aspects of a student's speech. For example, the normal word rate when making a speech is normally between 100 to 165 words per minute. The new feature can detect if a student is speaking too quickly or too slowly and advise them to either slow down or speed up their speech.
The feature can also advise students to adjust their volume and pitch during their speech so that their voice does not have a monotone inflection. It can also detect if a student might be using filler words like "um" or "er" and remind them not to put in those kinds of words. It can also detect if a student might overuse certain common words and not use profanity or culturally insensitive terms.
The feature can also use a camera to see if a student is facing the lens directly and instruct them to keep their face clear and have a normal amount of distance from that camera.
Microsoft says that it will add more features to Speaker Progress later this fall. They will include more language support and a way to record students giving speeches and sharing content while also viewing the notes that are given out during the presentation.
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