Video: 3D character acts as job interview coach
Nervous about that job interview? You鈥檇 better have a chat with Mach: an avatar designed to help people succeed in nerve-wracking social situations.
Mach stands for , and it takes the form of a 3D-animated character, who asks a raft of typical interview questions. The system watches your face via webcam and can recognise gestures and facial expressions, what you say and even how you say it and respond with some useful advice on improving your interview technique.
鈥淢ach plays the role of the interviewer: it will smile at you, it will nod its head at the right points and at the end it will give you feedback,鈥� says Ehsan Hoque of MIT鈥檚 Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He designed the system with colleagues at the University of Madison-Wisconsin and LIMSI, a French research lab near Paris. For instance, Mach can show you how often you smiled on a timeline of the interview, or when you 鈥渦mmed鈥� and 鈥渁hhed鈥�, or mumbled inaudible answers.
Advertisement
It can also tell if your technique is improving across a series of mock interview sessions. Mach will be put through its paces at a in St Andrews, UK, in October.
Better still, says Hoque, it learns across a number of mock interview sessions and can tell you if your technique is improving.
A key part of Mach鈥檚 offering is its ability to help people in private sessions 鈥� nobody else needs to know what the system told you and you get to keep your data. That means there is no social stigma attached to needing to use it, says Hoque. Student volunteers who tried the system out were later judged to be better at presenting themselves by MIT careers counsellors than those who had not.
Hoque鈥檚 team are now hoping to raise funds to rewrite Mach so that it can be deployed anywhere in the world via desktop internet browsers.
If the idea of private chatbot sessions doesn鈥檛 appeal, the notion of people consulting an AI therapist has a noble pedigree. In 1964, AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum, also at MIT, wrote a program called that asked simple psychoanalytic questions based on keyword patterns. So a 鈥減atient鈥� who mentioned his or her mother would get the stock response 鈥淭ell me about your mother鈥� from Eliza. Many users were fooled and felt Eliza actually understood them 鈥� and surprised Weizenbaum by asking for private sessions with it.
But , an executive career coach based in London, doubts that Mach will be able to recognise the full gamut of subtle human behaviours that make all the difference in interviews for high-powered jobs. 鈥淎 flesh and blood coach doesn鈥檛 just count nods, smiles and overuse of the word 鈥榖asically鈥�. We look for many, many different types of smiles, nods and even silences. Changes in skin colour and breathing rate say a lot, too.鈥�
However, she thinks Mach is 鈥渇ascinating鈥� and could make a big difference in rehabilitating the social skills of people recovering from stroke or brain injury.
