New Software Can Help You with Your Social Skills
If you think you’re awkward in social situations, some researchers at MIT may be able to help you overcome your self-consciousness—with a rather awkward solution that doesn’t actually involve any other people.
They’ve developed new software called MACH—an acronym for My Automated Conversation coacH—that uses a digital face generated on a computer screen to provide you with a conversation practice subject. The life-size face can smile, nod, ask questions, and give responses in the pattern of real communication. The software has facial- and speech-recognition tools that can analyze your behavior to give feedback on how well you interact.
The software’s dissection of each communication session tells users how much they smiled, how well they maintained eye contact, how loudly and quickly they talked, and how frequently they used “pause fillers,” such as “like” or “um.” This practice and subsequent analysis could give more confidence to a range of people—from those with your run-of-the-mill nervousness about public speaking to those with Asperger’s syndrome who have difficulty responding to social cues.
“Interpersonal skills are the key to being successful at work and at home,” said MIT Media Lab doctoral student M. Ehsan Hoque, who led the research for MACH. “How we appear and how we convey our feelings to others define us. But there isn’t much help out there to improve on that segment of interaction.”
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 15 million adults in the United States are affected by social phobias, which often leads to their avoiding events or resisting meeting new people. Hoque says these individuals want “the possibility of having some kind of automated system so that they can practice social interactions in their own environment. … They desire to control the pace of the interaction, practice as many times as they wish, and own their data.”
MACH proved its worth in an experiment at MIT. Ninety students were divided randomly into three groups and went on fake job interviews with career counselors. Then, one group watched videos of interview advice; one had a practice session with the MACH simulation and then watched recordings of their conversations; and the last group used MACH, watched video of themselves interacting, and got analyses of how they communicated.
A week later, the students all had second interviews with the career counselors. The last group was judged to have significant improvement between their first and second interviews, while the other two groups didn’t show much difference.
MACH is designed to run on an ordinary laptop and uses a webcam to capture the user’s facial expressions and a microphone to analyze speech, so it’s likely anyone would be able to purchase and use the software. A paper about the software’s development and testing will be presented at the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, or UbiComp, in September.
