Udemy, a leading education platform, is taking a unique step into the world of AI. It’s not a chatbot, or some kind of AI content generator. Instead, Udemy has created a conversational AI to practice your soft skills.
The idea is to give you a safe and risk-free space to practice your communication skills. This could be for an upcoming interview, conversations as a manager, or simply to improve your speaking skills for all situations.
Still in its early stages, Udemy gave me access to the tool to try out. I spent a few hours chatting with an AI in two different scenarios to see if this could be the future of soft skills training.
How does it work?
Udemy gave me access to two courses. In one, I was a manager and the other, I was an employee.
In both, I was given a scenario and a description of the person (or AI person to be more specific) that I was chatting to. You are also given four goals that you need to try to achieve during your conversation.
Once you start the role play, you are greeted with an AI-generated image of a person and a voice playing, setting up the conversation.
You can choose to either speak through your microphone or chat via text, going back and forth until you feel you have achieved all of your goals.
Then, end the role play and you’ll get given a score, addressing how many (if any) of your goals you’ve managed to hit.
Sounds easy enough, so is it any good?
My experience
I kicked things off role playing as the manager. I tried both chatting via voice and text. The voice option is a lot slower, with the system having to translate what you are saying to text before running it through the system for the AI to reply.
However, while it was a slower process, I did prefer this method. It felt more natural, even with the very AI-generated feeling voice replying back to you.
Each session took roughly 10 minutes, going back and forth discussing issues and trying to hit the goals. However, while the AI would always pick up on what i was saying, it never really felt like there was any actual consequence to what I said.
If you said anything vaguely positive, you’d get a very eager response back, and anything negative would be greeted positively too. It’s a bit like having a conversation with training wheels on.
However, this isn’t to say that there is no benefit to the conversations. Take it seriously and it forces you to think carefully through each of the tasks, being greeted with accurate responses to your comments.
When I didn’t answer a question or tried to swerve around it, the AI would respond, while in an enthusiastic tone, essentially asking me to answer the question.
Once you have finished the conversation and hit end, the AI will analyse your performance, seeing how many of your goals you achieved for the conversation. This scoring seemed pretty solid, only rewarding me when I had fully delved into each goal.
Overall thoughts
This technology isn’t perfect, but I really like where it is going. It offers a more intuitive alternative to the often dry training programs we get for these kind of skills.
Udemy has also pointed out that these are just examples of what the technology can do. Companies will be able to create their own customized scenarios with individual characters, goals and challenges.
In theory, this could present as more difficult characters to interact with or much more unique scenarios. While this seems to be aimed at workplace situations, it could equally translate to training for confidence during live speaking, learning new skills through conversation, or even practice for dating.
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