Introduction

really nice to meet you all my name is Scara I am co-founder and CEO at debate

Panel Members

mate joined by Carl our CTO and he will give you a bit more information about his background um before we get started

Common Communication Challenges

I want to ask you guys a few questions has anyone ever been in a situation where they've said in a thousand words what could be said in a

100 yeah cool lawyers definitely put your hand up you definely do as a former lawyer I can say that um have you ever

been in a situation where someone's asked you a question maybe in a team meeting environment and your mind goes blank you don't know what to say and then you come up with the answer five minutes later when you leave the room or

later that night yeah and finally has anyone been in a presentation environment or a pitch environment where someone asks you a question and they keep interrupting you perhaps and they kind of hijack the conversation and it's

hard to bring it back yeah okay look

Typical Scenarios

these are all really common uh use cases for uh the trouble with effective communication in the workplace um I'm

About Debate Mate

from debat mate we started 15 years ago as a charity running debating clubs and schools and we have developed the

best-in-class human skills training that uses debating to teach you how to communicate effectively so people I want

Debating and Public Speaking

to start I of I want to start with those questions because people often think debating they think public speaking um

but actually public speaking is only a really small part of being a good

debater did anyone here have a debate at school or university yeah a few people

cool okay so you know that being a good debater isn't just about speaking well that is important but actually to be a good debater you need to listen you need

to be able to respond well when people challenge you you need to be able to think on your feet you need to be able to Pivot and respond in case your

Skills Required for Good Debating

argument isn't going the way you want it to go you have to have empathy to be able to argue for things potentially that you don't believe in um you have to

have resilience because people will disagree with you and challenge you and that can be really triggering for some people but you have to be able to like

come back from it and not let it throw you and ultimately you have to have a core confidence that will allow you to kind of show up and take part in any

conversation in any situation in any room and absolutely nail it and that is what we at debate mate teach you how to

Awareness and Outreach

do so has anyone here heard of debate mate before few there cool thank you so

for those that don't I'll just give you a a bit of a a bit of a story before we show you what we're uh really excited to

show you here today so debate mate as I mentioned started off um as a as a charity we started off 15 years ago

running after school debate clubs and schools um we started off in London just working in 30 schools and now we have

nearly 6,000 kids A week going through the program specifically targeting students in areas of high child poverty

it's absolutely amazing the kids who come through our program are phenomenal

The Evolution and Impact of Debate Mate

but you might ask why we're here today um we would bring the kids that were uh in the in the schools program we'd bring them to the businesses that funded the charity so Banks and law firms and we bring the kids in to do a show debate to kind of show where CSR budget was going

Testing the Model

amazing and uh then in the last kind of eight years or so we've really tested the model were we just a one hit wonder with audit or can it work in other teams as well and uh spoiler alert it works uh everywhere so we work in pretty much every different industry at every level from from kind of Entry levels you know Apprentice people who've been there for 3 weeks all the way up to seite um we

work with I think now it's nearly 15% of the footy 100 we work globally covid was transformative for us we took everything online we ran live classroom Based

training and we're in a situation now where we have an amazing business an amazing product everyone loves it but we are looking to see how we can bring that

magic and bring that debate mate experience to everyone everywhere we have amazing clients who um are huge love what we do and can't roll out our model as it currently is being delivered so we've always been like we want to

Technological Integration

experiment with AI we want to experiment with um you know online learning but not sure if it's to be honest but 40 years

ago we were very uninspired by online learning it just seemed really generic really boring wasn't going to achieve

the outcomes that we wanted to achieve and also most importantly debating is a two-way process like the reason why our

methodology achieves the outcomes that we want it to is because it's like necessarily interative acve and up until

two years ago it was very hard to envisage a world where you could have that interactivity in a really

Partnerships and Innovations

meaningful way um but in the last two years we have been partnering with um professors at University College London

who have advised us on kind of what we could do with generative AI um and then we met Carl and Carl has completely

AI Integration and Demonstration

changed absolutely everything for us so without further Ado I'm going to hand over to Carl I think it's all set up now

we're all good and we're going to get started thanks Scarlet thank you very

Introduction to AI in Debate Mate

much yeah when I first learned that debate mate had trained Auditors to feel empathy I thought I need to work with

these guys um my name is Kyle Partridge uh I am a nerd by background um my original uh degree was in artificial intelligence uh way back when uh I'm an

exited founder and these days I work with early stage technology companies helping them to integrate Ai and Tech and set up their Tech Team um Tech Team

and when I first met scarlet and began to understand a little bit more about the business it became apparent just how exciting the potential to leverage AI

Capabilities of AI in Communication Training

was in human skills training AI is an absolutely perfect fit for what debate may do um and I'm going to assume a

broad knowledge of AI uh for the purpose purp is of today given the the title of the Meetup and the the makeup of the audience I'm going to assume you all know at least a little bit about what it

does and what it is um it's really good at patent matching so spotting Trends uh that makes it absolutely perfect for Learning and

Communications it's very very good at summarization and assessment so it's actually very good at

picking out bite-sized chunks and turning those into lesson plans or beginning to spot those patter p s that

we just talked about in terms of how well are people communicating areas where they could

improve content generation allows those lessons to be personalized and branded and then tailored to suit

Multimodal AI and Future Prospects

individuals uh on top of all that of course we all know AI is becoming multimodal uh if you've tried out I know

I know Josh was touting advanced voice mode via some sort of amazing VPN hack um you can try it out now in this

country if you VPN in uh the new version of the chat GPT app uh and the difference is that rather than sending

text into that large language model we're actually sending the waveform of your voice I mean it is literally

mindblowing stuff not literally mind-blowing otherwise I wouldn't have a mind uh I think that word is overused

but it is mind-blowing stuff so on top of the audio feed we're looking at being able to feed video and

video streams into AI as early as quarter 1 next year we think that will be uh publicly

released that raises a prospect of AI That's able to see us understand things like hand gestures eye contact all of

this feeds amazingly well into a system that is going to help us become better

Introducing Willis: The AI-Powered Mentor

communicators so debate Mator using AI to turbocharge a new experience of an AI powered Mentor we want to increase

engagement the first thing that scarlet told me is that when people deliver human skills training in the workplace one of the greatest challenges is getting that to continue outside the

classroom so we want to create a pocket version of that Mentor that delivers tailored experiences virtual practice in

a safe space what do I mean by that I mean like being able to have a difficult conversation with a boss but the AI is a standing for your boss or imagine trying to work out how you're going to tell a colleague that they've got a Bo problem not an easy one is it you practice in

front of the mirror or you could practice with an AI a super realistic Avatar that is able to take the place and be a spiring

partner we can measure we can assess and we can actually Benchmark improvements to communication skills on top of that

Features and Functionality

so I'd like to introduce Willis we're going to give you a sneak preview uh of the tech tonight um these are some

design prototypes of what that tool is going to look like essentially we're using an iterative approach assess learn practice uh I'll be showing you the

assess part of this tonight so the idea that we can Baseline your communication skills so we'll be able to record a video and we'll be able to actually look at individual metrics that make up what makes a good communicator and the AI will actually be able to rate score and Baseline those I'll come back to

that learning a whole range of tailored content some of it generated on the Fly by Ai and practice we just talked about that

sparring partner got some visualizations from the team of what that's going to look like when you can have practice that difficult conversation with a a fake colleague or a fake

Live Demonstration

manager so anyone that follows me on

LinkedIn will know that I'm not a big fan of a live demonstration but this is just one of those things that I think you probably agree it has to be tried out live otherwise if you don't demonstrate this one live it loses all the fun so so bear with us because it could all go horribly wrong but hey that's what these things are for right um what we're going to do

in fact can I ask you to hold that this is where I should have taken the radio mic option isn't it uh okay thank you sorry to reduce you to the the roll of microphone aler uh right so what I'm going to do is I'm going to I am going to show you all a prototype of our Communications trailer trainer and here it is up on the screen

Assessment and Feedback

now this is our prototype model of Willis and we're actually going to measure Scarlet's skill profile live tonight that's why it was worth coming out here in the rain um so what we have here thank you what we have here are 16 different metrics and these have been established over a decade of human skills training by debate mate things

like sign posting introducing a point using examples um debate may have been working to effectively encode what makes good Communications into data points so that we can take that structured data and we feed it into Ai and we can take the unstructured output back and we can convert it into a skills profile and you'll be able to hold this in your hand in an app and you'll be able to take a

video assessment which is what we're going to do now so the way in which the video assess works is that you have to talk for a minute you have to debate a point or explain something or make an argument but just to prove that we're not making this up and it's not all pre-rehearsed we'd like to I take a suggestion from the crowd so can I hand over to you to take a suggestion has

anyone got a topic that they would like me to debate anything at all maybe something that is interesting that's happening in work at the moment yeah what's the best neighborhood to live in in London what oh I mean I can definitely do that um want to go for that any other any other suggestions yeah is a sened s I don't know quite how we would

debate that one that's okay two two more anyone else y Harris what what what whether she should win I mean that seems pretty clear like more politicized one that we might not want to what the neighborhood what yeah okay so Scarlet if I could ask you to this is a this is going to simulate simulating the app but we're going to

use my laptop so everyone could see on the screen if you can get nice and close I don't do a perfect job do I need this no I'll take that I'll hold it close to you all right you ready yeah okay there you go so there are many neighborhoods in London um obviously loads of great history but the best one is brickton Brookton is in South London brickton is

the home of multiculturalism it's where you get the best food it might be quite far away for people that live in North London but frankly the Victoria line is also the best tube line so you always get a seat when you start at brickton um it's got amazing live music and uh really venues and Cinemas and it's also home to uh the best coffee shop in South London uh as voted by Vogue called beans

and beets which also happens to be owned by my husband um so if anyone ever wants to trip down to Brixton please do come down we're there and big brickton fans at heart and that's why it's the best neighborhood in London thank you very much amazing happy with your performance Scarlet could have done better okay

several reasons why brion's so good talked about why other neighborhoods aren't as good but so what's happening now is Scarlet speech is being sent to the large language model and essentially it's it's being rated on these 16 different data points things like did she introduce her Point well did she have a strong start and finish did she prioritize her points

well and all of these are aspects of communication that are used by debate mate mentors in real life and I'm told it takes a few hours uh with a large cohort probably a couple of days for a team of mentors to turn these assessments around and the AI is turning this around in less than 30 seconds so from a scalability perspective this is

extremely exciting now we've got the we've got the results back and you can in fact Skarlet you scored a two congratulations I think don't give it your day job oh wait uh you got two um we haven't put all the metrics in there yet but what we can do is we can actually we can click through and see the model summary of each different point and

ultimately this is going to be a photorealistic avatar that's what we're aiming for but for now uh we have text great work you've effectively communicated a clear and focused message about why Brixton is the best neighborhood in London your points about multiculturalism food and transportation were persuasive and impactful to improve consider further emphasizing the unique

and impactful contributions of Brixton and stay even more tightly on point throughout agree with that fair it's been we've we've spent a couple of months uh essentially doing the beginnings of our prompt engineering work with this um we haven't got to fine tuning yet I'm including this detail because I know that we we like to have a bit of a technical aspect to these

presentations and the next thing we're going to work on is essentially benchmarking this against Mentor performance at the moment using a Pearson coefficient we're getting within about 85 to 99 % of human scoring accuracy uh on some of these metrics so it's been a very very exciting start and

the next steps for us after this um are going to be enhancing the product putting our full Tech team together and actually fleshing out the Prototype and adding in the rest of this iterative