Getting Over Stage Fright With the Help of Your Smartphone

From The New York Times:

For some people, public speaking comes naturally. But if you are like me, you may um and ah too much, spurred by the worry that nerves may get the best of you, that you might speak too fast or mess up in some way. So I have been practicing my public speaking with the help of some apps.

One of those is a new app called Ummo. With Ummo, you take a prepared speech, tap the microphone icon, wait for the countdown, and then talk. As you speak, the app listens and automatically logs the words, the number of pauses and the use of pesky filler words like … you know, like, right?

Ummo can show a transcript of what you have said on the screen. To improve, you can tell the app to beep when you use a filler word and edit the list of filler words to include ones you know you overuse.

Ummo can then give data like how many words were spoken and how often words were reused. It also displays your pace in words per minute, how loud you were, whether your volume was consistent and so on. The data is presented in easy-to-read graphs, and if you tap on a point in the graph, you can see the words in the speech transcript at that moment. The idea is to learn when in the speech you faltered so you can practice and fix mistakes.

Sometimes Ummo misunderstands the words that were said (though admittedly this American-made app may have had an issue with my British accent), and I wish it kept a log of speech data to track whether there was improvement with practice. But Ummo is easy to use. It costs $2 and is available only on iOS.

Part of the terror of public speaking is standing in front of a group of people who are paying attention to you. This is a problem that the app Public Speaking by Virtual Speech may help alleviate.

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