8–12 Sept 2026
Europe/Vienna timezone

The Audience Reactor: An Embodied Sparring Partner for Public- Speaking Training

FA2026/206
9 Sept 2026, 15:40
20m
Galerie B (Messe Congress Graz)

Galerie B

Messe Congress Graz

Speaker

Idun Elvira Christensen (University of Southern Denmark)

Description

Public-speaking skills comprise a set of interrelatedabilities, including vocal delivery, linguistic appropri-ateness, and audience-oriented communication. How-ever, this multidimensionality makes it challenging toprovide individualized, high-quality feedback, particu-larly within time-constrained curricula and in contextswhere instructors lack specialized training in oral com-munication pedagogy.To address this problem, the Audience Reactor wasdeveloped. The Audience Reactor is a humanoid-likerobot that gives feedback during the user’s speech,allowing them to actively improve and see their per-formance based on the robot’s reaction. The reactionsinclude facial expressions, body colour changes, mo-tion, and sound cues and icons indicating the speechparameters most important to improving the over-all speech quality. The robot is designed to give theimpression of actively listening to the user, with thefeedback being playful to encourage its use. The algo-rithm from which the feedback is derived is a speechanalysis algorithm provided by the company AllGo-odSpeakers. A web application allows the user to seetheir progress and a more detailed speech analysisthrough the saved results from previous sessions.

Authors

Idun Elvira Christensen (University of Southern Denmark) Vivien Johanna Wegener (University of Southern Denmark) Ivan Varbanov (University of Southern Denmark) Ferenc József Marton (University of Southern Denmark) Ïo Valls-Ratés (University of Southern Denmark) Oliver Niebuhr (University of Southern Denmark)

Presentation materials