iCoach: a Virtual Career Counselor

A successful job interview depends what you say and more importantly, how you say it. A study done at UCLA a few years ago revealed that the impact of a performance was based 7 percent on the words used, 38 percent on voice quality, and 55 percent on nonverbal communication. We are building an interactive multimedia system iCoach to assist job seekers in improving their speaking skills in a job interview. By streamlining and combining the audio/video capturing, editing, audio analysis, and performance report generating processes into one cohesive system users get instant feedback for improving their speaking skills. Interacting with a virtual career counselor, a prospective job hunter will answer a series of questions and have his or her interaction recorded by a video camera. The system then performs audio analysis on the recording and generates a performance report detailing the user's speaking characteristics, such as energy, tone variation, pitch range and the length of time the user takes to answer a question. Based on the performance report, the user can choose to redo individual questions or the entire session, and visualize the results in order to compare with different trials.