About Dirk Heylen (NL)

For many people, public speaking is a nightmare. And consequently nonprofessional and even professional speakers take intensive speech coaching to communicate more effectively. However, taking the vast advancement in speech technology into account, one cannot help but wonder if communication skills will soon be provided by Artificial Intelligence. Considering the immense progresses in computer analyses of body language and human vocals, and also taking into account the developments in emotion recognition, it seems more than feasible that machines whom successfully progress in mimicking our cognitive functions will soon be supporting effective feedback on our flawed communication. During his talk entitled “The Perfect Artificial TED-talk Coach: coming soon, or never?” Prof. Dirk Heylen from Socially Intelligent Computing at the University of Twente, will talk about his research that targets the use of Artificial Intelligence to create the perfect talk. He will discuss that aside from recognising, an Artificial Intelligence most crucially should necessitate understanding and interpreting the whole gamut of conversations, including gestures, posture and facial expressions. On TEDxUHasselt 2017 he will unravel if ‘The Perfect Speech Coach’ will shortly be available in the App Store.