Can an AI-Powered Presentation Platform Based On The Game "Just a Minute" Be Used To Improve Students' Public Speaking Skills?
Frederic Higham, Tommy Yuan
TL;DR
The paper investigates whether an AI-powered presentation platform modeled on the Just a Minute JAM game can improve university students' public speaking skills. It develops a local Flask-based JAM platform powered by LLMs for speech generation, transcription, and feedback, and evaluates it through pre/post questionnaires and a 10-student playtest, capturing engagement, perceived usefulness, and basic performance metrics. Results show strong user engagement and perceived benefits for spontaneous speaking and reducing disfluencies, but provide no robust short-term evidence of skill improvement due to the brief exposure and transcription challenges. The study highlights the promise of gamified AI-driven practice for public speaking education while acknowledging limitations in STT accuracy, latency, and the need for longitudinal, larger-scale studies to establish efficacy.
Abstract
This study explores the effectiveness of applying AI and gamification into a presentation platform aimed at University students wanting to improve their public speaking skills in their native tongue. Specifically, a platform based on the radio show, Just a Minute (JAM), is explored. In this game, players are challenged to speak fluently on a topic for 60 seconds without repeating themselves, hesitating or deviating from the topic. JAM has proposed benefits such as allowing students to improve their spontaneous speaking skills and reduce their use of speech disfluencies ("um", "uh", etc.). Previous research has highlighted the difficulties students face when speaking publicly, the main one being anxiety. AI Powered Presentation Platforms (AI-PPPs), where students can speak with an immersive AI audience and receive real-time feedback, have been explored as a method to improve student's speaking skills and confidence. So far they have shown promising results which this study aims to build upon. A group of students from the University of York are enlisted to evaluate the effectiveness of the JAM platform. They are asked to fill in a questionnaire, play through the game twice and then complete a final questionnaire to discuss their experiences playing the game. Various statistics are gathered during their gameplay such as the number of points they gained and the number of rules they broke. The results showed that students found the game promising and believed that their speaking skills could improve if they played the game for longer. More work will need to be carried out to prove the effectiveness of the game beyond the short term.