The Future of GoReact: AI & Skill Mastery

Presenter:

Hyrum Denney brings over 15 years of product experience in the SaaS industry, complemented by a background in computer science and human-computer interaction. Passionate about crafting and delivering impactful user experiences across diverse product landscapes, Hyrum has made significant contributions to several prominent technology companies including SirsiDynix, HealthEquity, Sling TV, and HireVue. He currently leads product design, product management, and product strategy as the VP of Product at GoReact.

Transcript:

Hyrum Denney:

All right, well, I am very excited to be participating in this session today. We are going to talk about the future of GoReact, artificial intelligence, skill mastery, and all of the fun things. We have a lot in store here at GoReact that we have been working toward, and we think it’ll benefit so many of you. We have a desire to help people master skills in better ways, more effectively, and faster than without GoReact. That drives us to do great things, to work on things that we feel like will help all of you.

But in order to do that, to help people master skills, we understand that we need to be aware of the challenges that you’re facing as coaches and teachers and instructors. Some of those challenges that you’ve told us about and that we’ve seen are lack of student engagement, the increased workload that you have to deal with, being able to give quality feedback and the amount of time that that takes. Helping students master skills, which can be a slow process. And also just not having enough teaching moments for each individual student.

Students have their own set of challenges as well. Some of those include the dependencies on learning. Often those students won’t start the learning process and work on those skills without somebody else prompting them or pushing them. And even when they want to work on those skills, sometimes they just don’t know what they can do on their own. Sometimes they do practice, but it’s ineffective practice. Also, they have limited engagement opportunities. There’s only so many places where they can jump in and complete the work, and they can’t expect the instructor to give them all the opportunities that they really need to master those skills.

And then lastly, one of the challenges that we’re keenly aware of is that sometimes there’s just a delayed feedback loop. They’ll demonstrate, they’ll record, and it’ll take days or sometimes even weeks for them to get the feedback they need to know what they can improve on. And by that time they’ve already moved on to a different aspect of the skill, or they’ve just pushed past it in their mind and they don’t even remember how their demonstration went. So that delayed feedback loop is a problem.

So at GoReact, we want to help with anything we can. So some of our goals include that we want to elevate and accelerate learner-led skill mastery. This doesn’t mean that they will do it without an instructor or coach, but it means that there’s part of the learning process that needs to be learner-initiated. We want to help provide evidence of skill mastery. If people can see where they’re at in their skill journey and how they’re progressing, they’ll be more likely to want to practice and improve. And as instructors and coaches, that evidence helps you know where they are. And we also want to save you time and effort while maintaining the privacy, quality, and authenticity needed to master those skills.

So taking all of these things into account, we have been continuing to innovate and brainstorm, and work through different types of solutions that will help you achieve these things. And today we are excited to announce our new AI assistant. This is really exciting for us. Our new AI assistant will help with self-reflection. It’ll help pinpoint different behaviors in the video automatically. It will identify patterns that students and instructors need to be aware of. It will provide ideas for improvement. Engagement will increase if used to its full capacity. And it can even help reduce bias by providing different thoughts, insights, and reflection points within the product that maybe the student or the teacher hadn’t thought of. And then of course, we want to maximize your time as an expert in helping analyze the student behavior, and we believe that this AI assistant will empower you to do your job better in helping further those skills.

So we are offering this as our new AI assistant. In that there’s a few things that we will include, and I’ll dive into each of these more specifically throughout this presentation. The AI assistant will include AI metrics, which are basically analytics that we’re automatically running right when the video gets recorded or uploaded. Those metrics will show some basic measurements about the presentation so that they can see how they performed throughout the whole time, and find some areas that they need to be aware of. In addition to the analytics and metrics, we have AI markers. We know that our markers are one of our most popular features. People love to be able to put markers in.

One of the downsides of markers is it takes a lot of time to go through and tag every part of the video where you’re identifying behaviors. We believe that this will be a huge boost to help you find the things you’re looking for. These AI markers will be automatically dropped in for the behaviors we’re looking for at different types of the video based on words that were spoken in the video. And lastly, the AI comments. As those markers and behaviors are identified throughout the videos, there will be an option to turn on AI comments, which will provide reinforcement or improvement suggestions for each behavior that was identified. It can automatically give some ideas of how to improve skills.

All of these things happen immediately after the video is recorded, processed, a transcription is created, and then these AI tools run and become available right away. In addition to our AI assistant, we’re also announcing that we’re bringing to you searchable transcripts. So any spoken words in the video or recording will be now available in our new transcript tab within the product that you can read through and search. And we found that this is very helpful while listening to the video, you can follow along with the words and find more ways to leave feedback.

We’re also excited to announce that we will have a new HD video option, and we’re increasing our upload limit to now 10 gigabytes, which is five times more than we’ve had in the past. So we’re excited to offer those things to you. We’ve heard the needs, we’ve heard your interest, and this will all be a part of a new option that you’ll be able to upgrade to if you’re interested. Okay, some of you may be wondering. If the AI assistant can do all of these things, it can provide metrics and drop in markers and leave comments, and do all of this. Is GoReact trying to replace me with artificial intelligence as an instructor or coach? The answer is no. Absolutely not.

We believe that this AI assistant is an assistant. It’s to help you. It’s to support you. It’s to support the students. It is not to replace, and it won’t replace. We’re just not there in the technology world. I think we want to pretend that AI can just replace humans in all facets of life, but that’s not how we’re going to master skills successfully together. So let’s walk through some of the accelerators of skill mastery. At the base of this foundation, there’s a need for somebody to observe and watch somebody else perform a skill. If we take a public speech, somebody who’s trying to get better at public speaking, they may want to go watch somebody else give a speech first before they’re ready to record themself or perform their speech. That’s foundational. They need to understand what is a public speech, how do I do that, and what are effective and ineffective techniques? And not just read about those, but they need to observe and analyze others doing it.

Layered on top of that, the next step is they can go practice by themself. They can observe their public speech, they can watch, they can rerecord, they can keep doing this in a place that now they’ve modeled. They’ve seen somebody else model that behavior. They do it themself. They self-reflect, and they rerecord again. Now we get to level three, and this is where the world hasn’t provided any great solutions to a lot of these. This issue is it’s the feedback loop problem that we talked about. I’m not quite ready to push my public speech out to the whole world, but I don’t know what else to think about in my self-reflection and my self-observation. I could go watch more YouTube videos, I could go record myself, but I’ve reached a ceiling of practicing on my own. And this is where some of this automated accelerated feedback can come into play.

We can provide them markers and comments and analytics that will help them become more self-aware, and then they can go back to the bottom again and either observe more people doing those behaviors that they noted or they can rerecord and try again. The next accelerator is then expanding out beyond their own presentation ability. They can take the recorded speech that they’ve practiced to this point to peers and people that they trust who can provide them additional feedback and insight.

This is all great, but this still can only get somebody to a certain level of proficiency within a skill. And this is why AI and all these other accelerators will not replace you as a coach and as an instructor. The pinnacle of the feedback is the expert. It’s the coach. It’s the person who has the years of experience, the knowledge and all of the things they need to pull together that feedback. By providing these first four bottom layers, it gives the coach an opportunity towards the end of the process to then come in and give the type of feedback that’s needed down the road. They don’t have to worry about the filler words as much and the little things that the peers or the self-observation, or just all of those small things that the person practicing can work out as they do it.

So keep in mind, when we’re talking about introducing artificial intelligence into GoReact, we’re talking about that third layer. It’s just one more way to help them expand their thinking and prepare to receive the peer feedback and the expert feedback that you can provide. So now let’s talk about what this looks like. When we first decided to pursue artificial intelligence, I didn’t want it to be just this sticker on the side of the box, “Now with AI.” It feels like so many companies are claiming they have artificial intelligence, and then you go in and look at what they’re offering and it’s a lot of fluff. We did not want to deliver something like that.

We knew that if we were going to bring artificial intelligence to GoReact, it needed to solve real problems and make a real difference for learners. So let’s dive in and have a closer look at what we can do with transcripts and AI in GoReact today.

The transcript is based off of the audio, and the cool thing about our transcript is that each little section here, as you can see, has a timestamp on it just like GoReact does with the comments. And as you click on this transcript tab, you will be able to scroll through and scan through the transcript. And if there’s a part you want to jump to in the video, you simply click on it and we will [inaudible 00:14:36] the video to that portion of the transcript, just like we do with the comments. We are working on speaker identification technology, so if there’s more than one speaker, we want to highlight those. And we’re hoping in the future to be able to even allow you to provide the names of each of the speakers.

There’s a filter at the top that if you want to bold or highlight the filler words or the hedging words within that transcript, you can select that filter up at the top. And as you can see in this example, um and like are bolded, and we look forward to adding even more options to highlight things within there. You’ll also notice that the orange and the yellow there is using browser technology to allow you to type in any key words you want to search in that transcript. So you will no longer have to go through an entire video to find out if they’re using certain words or terms in that demonstration. You can quickly search and jump and find all of those instances, and then click right on that timestamp and it will jump you to the video.

We will continue to provide quick access to our feedback tools, so you’ll notice at the bottom you can be reading the transcript and still leaving comments on the comment feed. You can drop markers in, you can do all the things that you know and love about leaving feedback without having to switch back and forth to different areas of the product. And we just have a whole bunch of other things that we’re working on in relation to this. Next up are the AI metrics. These analytics are a starting point for us to provide some basic speech metrics. The four things that we’re starting with in this area include filler words, pauses, pace, and hedging words. So in this example of filler words, we’re showing three different filler words that were used, like, um, and so. And there’s a matching dot for each part of the timeline where those words were used.

The really cool part about this one as well is that each of those dots are clickable. So if you see an area of the video at 33 seconds or whatever it is where there’s a whole bunch of filler words, you can click on the dots related to that and it will jump you to that part of the video. So these aren’t just metrics, these are interactive metrics that empowers the coach and the learner to both have the context they need to understand the data provided. We’ve also moved our feedback graph into this new analytics tab, and it’s been reworked and improved to be more powerful and more effective than ever.

And then once again, those feedback tools are at the bottom as always so that you can review data and still leave comments. Now, onto the big ticket item. We have these automated markers and comments that can be customized in a selection option. You can pick which combination of markers that you want to drop in from our predefined lists, and then you can choose to have the feedback go in there as well. You can flag those specific behaviors, you can see the comments, those can be reinforcing, or comments that can suggest improvements. And then as you hover over each of those markers and comments that are provided by the AI, you can indicate, there will be a tool to indicate if that comment was helpful or not, which helps us improve the quality of the feedback that their artificial intelligence is providing.

This we believe will save so much time and effort, and provide so many opportunities for faster and better feedback. These are easy to set up in your activity settings. There’ll be a new option where you can go in and configure the AI markers and comments. Inside here, you can select the use case you have, whether it be communications, teacher preparation, or a variety of others, and pick the markers that have been set up for those behaviors. Up at the top you have the ability to turn off the AI comments. If all you want to do is identify those behaviors in the video but you don’t want the extra text comments, you can turn that off. And of course, if you don’t want the AI markers or the comments on a specific activity, you don’t have to use either. You can use it for one type of learning experience and then hide them for another.

Okay, so if you have more use cases that you want to include, we have a team of people dedicated to building this out as far as we can to support those use cases. And there’s a button at the bottom of this configuration screen where you can submit ideas for more markers and feedback tools. Because these are using development code and they’re programmed in, we don’t currently have an option for you to set up your own, but we are willing to partner with you to build these out for any use cases that make sense. And we want to empower this type of feedback everywhere we can.

So how and when can you get this? Well, the great news is early access is open today. If you are interested in signing up for our early access to AI features, we are going to run our early access program through the end of May. And you can take a look in the chat and there will be a link posted to sign up today for early access. And we may not allow everybody into that, so sign up sooner than later and we’ll try to get to as many people as we can and adding access to that.

Beginning in June, we will be turning on all of these tools for all of our customer base through the end of June. This doesn’t mean you have to use them, it means that you’ll have the opportunity to use them if you’re interested. You can try them out for free. And then starting in July, we will officially launch this new upgrade option, and our early access and free trial program for existing customers will end and you will be able to upgrade and receive all of those features, including the transcript, the AI options, and the upload in HD video options. So we are really excited to get going on that.

So this is what this early access page looks like, so please make sure you click on that link and sign up. And then we’re really getting to the end here. What’s my point? What am I trying to get at? Well, GoReact is trying to solve real problems with artificial intelligence, and we found that a lot of the competing solutions for skill mastery out there don’t do that in an effective way. These features are coming soon. GoReact and AI will elevate and accelerate skill mastery, and it will save instructors time. And we want to do this in a way that we can lift skill mastery while maintaining privacy, quality, and the authenticity that makes GoReact great.

So that’s our big exciting thing that we have going on. It’s still early access, there’s still a lot to figure out, but our responses so far have been phenomenal. And we believe that this can help learners and instructors. So now we’re going to turn for just a moment to the Q&A and then we will wrap up.

So first question, can you feed the AI assistant a rubric so it knows what to look for in the student video? That’s a great idea, that will not be available as of today, but that’s definitely a question we’ll take back to our product team to explore.

I’m just scrolling up here. There’s a question about holograms and some of those technologies. We don’t have anything today around that, but those are areas that we’re also interested, including augmented reality and virtual reality. Those are all things that we’re curious about as well, but we don’t have any current plans to implement those.

Next up, it seems solely applicable to spoken languages though. For those of us who teach American sign language, all the videos are visual rather than spoken. Is there a way to apply this tech to ASL? Great question, and I’m glad that was brought up because I wanted to touch on that. The first pass at this artificial intelligence is based off of the spoken word in that transcript, but we are actively pursuing additional solutions that will provide more visual analysis. We’re interested in discovering things like eye contact. We want to see what the artificial intelligence world can provide us as far as facial expression and all of those other things.

We don’t know exactly what that looks like, but we are very interested in partnering with our ASL friends to understand how they can envision artificial intelligence supporting them better. But yes, out of the gate, there probably won’t be a lot of value for our ASL friends. So work with us, keep in contact, and let’s brainstorm together what we can do to support you with this new technology.

Do the AI comments have an option to be made as suggestions to the instructor that are accepted or declined, or do you have to automatically accept them if they are on? This is an area we’re exploring. As of today in our early access mode, we’re posting all of those comments in the thread, but it’ll show that they’re posted by our AI assistant. The instructor can go through and delete any of those they want. They can also leave that thumbs down if they want, and the student would be able to see if the instructor did not accept that comment by seeing there’s a thumbs down on it.

Another way that we found is interesting to engage with the comments is that an instructor could challenge the student or the learner to go in and leave a reply on any of those. So if they don’t agree with some of the AI feedback, that could be a critical thinking opportunity for the student to go in and engage with the AI assistant and say, “Well, I feel like this is incorrect, because here is how I believe that this happened.” Or they could agree with it, but it’s an opportunity for engagement. So we’ll continue to explore that, and we’d love to hear your feedback as you access the early access program and discover what really is best as far as pushing those comments out.

I’d love to hear a discussion on nonverbal communication other than our language, as well as any ideas on simulated audience feedback without losing the phenomenal feelings that are associated with speaker and receiver communication. Yeah, those are great ideas, and we are exploring a number of things, in fact, to try to figure out what can we do to help people in a more back and forth dialogue engagement as well. Because of lack of time, we probably can’t dive too deep into that one, but feel free to reach out, happy to connect more on that.

My school uses GoReact. Does the July official launch apply to all current users or my school need to purchase and update GoReact with AI features? So for the June timeframe, we will turn it on for all of our customers. We want to get everybody access that we can. For July, that early access program will end and each organization will need to opt in and purchase the upgrade if they want to move to that. We will still maintain the current options that everybody has today, but if you want to be part of the AI program and all these new features starting in July, you’ll need to have a conversation with somebody on our sales team or our client success team to get you opted into that new package.

The price point. We are finalizing the price point on that, so keep an eye out. We’ll have some more announcements coming in the next week or two. We just purchased GoReact for the next school year, will the update, upgrade, apply to our contract? Yes, we will work with you. We’ll figure out a way to add this to anybody’s contract who’s just finished their purchasing opportunities. So we’re going to be flexible. We’re going to try to find the best way we can to give everybody access to this. We want everybody to be able to try it and get the benefit. Please join that early access program. We want your insight. We want to expand this to as many opportunities as possible.

Please come and accelerate and elevate with us. We believe skill mastery can be better than ever and we’re just getting started. So thank you. We appreciate you. We see you, and we can’t wait to work with you on all of these exciting things. Have a great day.