  This paper presents a description and evaluation of the ROC Speak system, a
platform that allows ubiquitous access to communication skills training. ROC
Speak (available at rocspeak.com) enables anyone to go to a website, record a
video, and receive feedback on smile intensity, body movement, volume
modulation, filler word usage, unique word usage, word cloud of the spoken
words, in addition to overall assessment and subjective comments by peers. Peer
comments are automatically ranked and sorted for usefulness and sentiment
(i.e., positive vs. negative). We evaluated the system with a diverse group of
56 online participants for a 10-day period. Participants submitted responses to
career oriented prompts every other day. The participants were randomly split
into two groups: 1) treatment - full feedback from the ROC Speak system; 2)
control - written feedback from online peers. When judged by peers (p<.001) and
independent raters (p<.05), participants from the treatment group demonstrated
statistically significant improvement in overall speaking skills rating while
the control group did not. Furthermore, in terms of speaking attributes,
treatment group showed an improvement in friendliness (p<.001), vocal variety
(p<.05) and articulation (p<.01).
