iCoach: A Virtual Career Counsellor

Team: Lin Jiang , Phoebe Liu

Description of the project

Not everyone can articulate his/her ideas well, especially when under pressure, for example, in a job interview. A successful job interview often depends on two key factors, content and presentation. Much of it is what the applicant says, and much of it is how it is being said. People often find it helpful to record their answers and play them back to identify noticeable problems. However, there are two problems in this practice. First, the mechanical process can be cumbersome and time consuming. Secondly, due to the lack of knowledge and expertise in speech quality, people cannot accurately identify the problem areas in their speech.

In order to address the above problems, we are building an interactive multimedia system to assist job seekers improve their speaking skills in a job interview by streamlining the audio/video capturing, editing, audio analysis, and performance report generating processes. Interacting with a virtual agent, user will answer a series of questions and have his/her interaction recorded by a camera. The system then performs audio analysis on the recording and generates a performance report detailing the user’s speaking characteristics, such as volume, speed, pitch variation, pause time, etc. Based on the performance report, user can choose to redo individual questions or the entire session and compare the results. .