Rate Speeches Releases The Speech Evaluator, An Interactive Online Public Speaking Evaluation Application

LOS ALTOS, CA, May 08, 2011 (Press-News.org) The company estimates that over a million public speaking and presentation skills evaluations are generated every year by tens of thousands of public speaking instructors, coaches, and other professionals. The Speech Evaluator simplifies the evaluation process. The Speech Evaluator can be used to generate interactive online evaluations of live speeches, live presentations, video recordings of speeches, and video recordings of presentations.

Many professionals in the field of communication evaluate their students and clients on regular basis. These professionals include college instructors, university professors, high-school teachers, seminar instructors, trainers, and coaches of public-speaking, presentation skills, oral presentations, oratory, speech-and-debate, and speech communication courses and seminars at colleges, universities, high schools, and training companies. Most of these evaluations are prepared manually using paper forms with different names such as evaluation forms, assessment forms, critique forms, feedback sheets, and evaluation rubrics. The evaluations are often organized as a table of criteria with ranking checkboxes. These forms suffer from several limitations. For example, in order for the evaluation form to fit in a single page, the criteria are limited in selection, too general in scope, and too broad to provide detailed enough feedback; in addition, the comments are not tied to specific locations in the speech.

Rate Speeches conducted an extensive study of available evaluation forms and created a web-based application, the Speech Evaluator, to solve these limitations. The Speech Evaluator offers hundreds of predefined feedback comments and it also allows users to add their own custom comments. The Speech Evaluator includes built-in details for each evaluation comment to provide the recipient with a thorough explanation of the comment. Because of the large selection of comments, feedback can be highly specific. A menu system makes adding comments fast and convenient with simple mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts. Each comment is timestamped to tie it to the exact location in the speech to which the comment pertains. The result is an interactive online evaluation with comments that are specific, detailed, instructive, and synchronized with the exact locations in the speech. The recipient of the evaluation can use the interactive online view or obtain a PDF report.

To make it fast and convenient to add evaluation comments, the hundreds of feedback comments are presented as a hierarchical menu with categories such as vocal, body language, organization, persuasion, supporting materials, and slides. Rich Guyon, cofounder and chief technical officer of Rate Speeches, remarks: "We understand that instructors do not have time to learn new technologies and do not have that much time allocated to generating evaluations. With that in mind, we designed the user interface, especially the menu system to be intuitive, efficient, quick to learn, and easy to use. We also made the solution fully web-based to make it accessible anywhere."

The Speech Evaluator does not require software downloads and is free to use from the company's website at http://www.RateSpeeches.com/SpeechEvaluator.

Rate Speeches, Inc. is a Silicon Valley firm providing online services and technologies to speakers, audiences, speech instructors and coaches, businesses, and event organizers; the Rate Speeches services and technologies facilitate enhancing public speaking and communication skills. To find out more, please visit http://www.RateSpeeches.com.