Communication Skills Gap to be Tackled with New AI Tool

Many of us believe our social Communication skills have deteriorated as a result of prolonged lockdowns. However, for certain people, especially those who come from non-English speaking families, social has always been a challenge. Now, one entrepreneur has discovered a method to harness the digitization of human contact to create an AI-powered tool that assists people in improving their verbal and nonverbal Communication abilities.

Balendran (Bala) Thavarajah, an entrepreneur and technologist, came up with the idea for GetMee while he had some spare time during the 2020 shutdown. It made him reflect on his own experience fleeing civil conflict and immigrating to Australia. Thavarajah tells CMO, “I couldn’t speak English at all, because I couldn’t go to school because of civil war. I ended up in Sydney without any language or any skills to offer, but because of sheer willpower and determination I learned the language and to communicate a little bit. I then did a computer science degree through a pathway program at Western Sydney University.”

Thavarajah started thinking about how he could use his technological skills to aid others in similar situations who wanted to enhance their communication skills. GetMee is a human-coach-backed AI-based skills training tool that can help users analyse their strengths and limitations and provide suggestions on how to improve. The app is based on 16 separate sets of principles that relate to Communication topics including emotion, mood, word and sentence form, energy, positivity, and negativity.

According to Thavarajah, AI has shown to be critical in both training the system to grasp Communication patterns and responding to the trainee’s specific demands. Encouragement of positive is an important aspect of training. The app will monitor your speech for the use of negative terms. GetMee’s main market, according to Thavarajah, has been language schools and organisations that help individuals find work.