Benedikt Groß

Mind the “Uuh” – Train yourself to avoid using uuh fill words

2022 Apr

Mind the “Uuh” is an experimental training device helping everyone to become a better public speaker. The cute little companion is constantly listening to the sound of your voice, aiming to make you aware of “uuh” fill words. These fillers are easy to avoid, but you have to start noticing them. Now every time you give a presentation and you say “uuh” – you will be aware :)

The prototype of Mind the “Uuh” was carefully designed as simple as possible: There is a bell, a volume knob which controls how hard the bell is hit or to turn it silent, a counter for your “uuh” stats and a reset button. The product design is deliberately making references to classic alarm clocks to convey the nature of Mind the “Uuh” intuitively.

For the detection of the “uuh”s the device runs a custom trained machine learning model, trained on 1500 samples of various durations from 300ms to 1 sec. This proof of concept model will notice distinctive “uuh” fillers but ignore very short utterances. All speech data is processed directly on device, nothing is sent to the cloud.