Whether you’re presenting at a wedding or in a meeting, pitching or protesting, speaking online or in person, we can all benefit from honing our communication skills. However, there is no magic solution to getting better at communication. Like improving at a sport, you have to focus on repetition, reflection, and feedback.
Books, videos, coaches, classes, and support organizations can serve as an essential starting place in helping you become a better communicator. In addition, you now have access to a number of apps and digital tools that can reinforce and extend what you learn as you strive to become a more confident, clear, and engaging communicator.
Apps for repetition
Practice and desensitization are essential to building and honing communication skills. These two apps can guide your practice and help you simulate high stakes situations:
Virtual Speech provides you with a virtual audience to practice in front of. While wearing VR goggles, you select one of several speaking environments (e.g., a large auditorium, an interview, a small conference venue) and audience type (e.g., engaged or disinterested). From here, you are free to communicate while seeing a simulated 360-degree environment with your audience in front of you and a screen behind you. The tool allows you to select a variety of speaking situations.
Rhetoric—The Public Speaking Game is a fun, creative game that helps you practice using different communication devices, such as analogies, stories, and quotes. Designed as a board game, you roll a die and move around the app’s board. You are provided with guidance to use particular rhetorical devices.
Apps for reflection
Communication habits can be difficult to change, https://www.detikindonesia.id/ but building awareness is a critical first step to making meaningful change and progress. These apps provide useful, personalized data to show you what you are doing, or not doing, when you communicate:
Orai, LikeSo, and Speako help with vocal delivery by giving you specific information about your word choice, pacing, pauses, variation, and tone. With regard to word choice, these tools identify disfluencies (such as “um” and “uh”) and filler words (such as “like,” “so,” and “right”). Apps like these also allow you to program desired terminology to keep track of (think: new product names or acronyms to define).
Tools for feedback
Beyond your own reflection, third-party insight can really catalyze communication skills development. The tools mentioned below represent two approaches to providing external communication feedback.
Poised.com runs alongside and integrates with your virtual tool (such as Zoom) and provides insights into your communication vocal patterns and also gives you guidance and advice on how to improve.
GOReact allows you to upload a video and then have others—peers, mentors, coaches, or teachers—provide type, video, or audio feedback that is displayed at that specific location in your presentation. That is, you get time stamped feedback that you see in real time when watching your recording.
When used in conjunction with direct coaching and instruction, these apps and tools can accelerate and deepen your communication skill development. With a little effort and persistence, you can make big strides in your communication effectiveness by using these innovative apps and tools.
