Presentation quality assessment using acoustic information and hand movements

Abstract

This study focuses on prosodic and gestural features that contribute to the positive judgement of public oral presentations. The general hypothesis is that certain prosodic characteristics, such as high pitch variation and perceived loudness, together with the production of natural hand gestures, influence the audience's perception of the speaker as a good presenter. Being able to identify features that can give an indication of a good presenter is useful for applications in the field of skills training, where automatic feedback could be provided to trainees at the end of their presentation about the extent to which they have been able to use their voices and gestures to keep the audience engaged. For this reason, we also propose a method, based on prosodic and visual features, able to categorise presentation quality with high accuracy.