Seattle-based startup Yoodli Inc. has raised a $1 million pre-seed funding round to develop a novel application of artificial intelligence: helping people overcome their fear of public speaking.

The company’s technology, which is still in development, uses a combination of machine learning and deep learning to analyze video clips of a speaker and call out verbal glitches and body language that may inhibit a person’s effectiveness.

The company, which announced the funding Thursday, was founded by Varun Puri, a former Alphabet Inc. special projects manager, along with former Apple Inc. product manager Esha Joshi and Ehsan Hoque, associate professor of computer science at the University of Rochester and head of the Rochester Human Computing Interaction group.

Worse than death

Public speaking anxiety affects about 73% of the population, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and is sometimes been said to instill greater apprehension than the prospect of death. Yoodli’s technology is “a tool to help you improve public speaking without the pressure of an audience,” Puri said.

During his tenure at Alphabet, he said, “I was helping a lot of colleagues practice for presentations and realized that there are so many people who don’t get across the ideas the way they need because they don’t have the presentation skills.”

Yoodli’s technology will be nonjudgmental, Puri said. Its feedback will point out anomalies such as frequent throat-clearing or use of verbal placeholders like “um” but without categorizing the behaviors as good or bad.

“We hope to show people something new they perhaps didn’t know,” Puri said, noting that what is acceptable often varies by culture and language. Yoodli will not evaluate the content of a presentation, leaving those judgments to human coaches.

The software, which is being developed internally, builds on examples set by Hoque at the University of Rochester’s Standardized Online Patient for Healthcare Interaction Education. That project created a virtual “patient” that helps physicians practice how to communicate effectively with late-stage cancer patients about their disease. It was intended to address communication barriers that frequently cause cancer patients to leave doctors’ offices underestimating the severity of their disease or their life expectancy.

Public speaking is just one of the potential applications of the technology, Puri said. Other potential uses include interview preparation, meeting facilitation, performance reviews and media training.

The technology is still “a few months away from launch,” Puri said. The company is taking early access requests on its website.

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