Giving AI Ears: AI Roleplay Feedback in Oral Presentations

By Ethan Mollick

An often-overlooked OpenAI product is Whisper, a voice-to-text system that is very, very good. If you are used to your phone’s voice recognition system, you know it makes a ton of errors. Whisper is much better. From my experiments, it handles everything from my rapid-paced talking style to heavy accents with equal ease. And now it is part of the ChatGPT app on mobile phones, making voice-to-text very easy.

This again changes how we can use AI. For example, you can use it as an intelligent assistant. If I tried to use voice-to-speech with Siri or Google to write an email, I would have to dictate every word I say. With ChatGPT on my phone, I can just state my intent, and the AI will do it. For example:

It is very easy to imagine the near future, where AI assistants are actually useful, and operate on your behalf, anticipating your needs, customizing answers to you, and more. A big contrast to trying to use Siri or Alexa today!

But this is not the only way that voice offers new opportunities. It can be very useful in education as well. As an example, I did an experiment in class using AI for real time presentation feedback. My entrepreneurship class was giving startup pitches, and we had a Venture Capitalist (VC) come to provide a human perspective, but I also had GPT-4 act as a real-time virtual VC, using voice recognition on the pitches and prompting it give VC-like feedback.

It was incredibly easy to do, and did not require any equipment or additional expense. I was able to sit in the front row of class and record the pitches directly with the ChatGPT app on my phone, it captured everything extremely well. At the end of each pitch, I just added a simple prompt: You are a seed stage venture capitalist who evaluates startup pitches. Evaluate the following pitch from that perspective and offer 4 positives and negatives, as well as what you think about the pitch overall as an investor. Here’s a sample of the output it gave:

Those results were of high quality, and the VC in the room was impressed. So were most of the students when I surveyed them. Everyone considered the results to be either somewhat or very realistic; 55% of students rated the feedback as very useful, and 35% as somewhat useful; 95% reported either minor or no hallucinations; and only 20% of the class did not find the feedback at least somewhat insightful.

Of course, this is just a small sample, but the ability to get feedback live to verbal presentations is an exciting one with lots of teaching implications. You can now get instant feedback from any simulated individual you want to any talk you want to give.

Work Cited

Mollick, Ethan. “I Did an Experiment in Class Using AI for Real Time Presentation Feedback,” 19 June 2023, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emollick_i-did-an-experiment-in-class-using-ai-for-activity-7076653722717577217-8LMy.

Mollick, Ethan. “On Giving AI Eyes and Ears.” One Useful Thing, 23 June 2023, https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/on-giving-ai-eyes-and-ears.