Toastmasters ropes in AI

Toastmasters offer more than 280,000 members standard free access to a Toastmasters version of the innovative Yoodli public speaking platform. Their partnership with a co-branded version of the platform is expected to be available to members by the end of the year.

“We are very excited to partner with Yoodli and establish our foothold in the arena of artificial intelligence and speech pattern recognition,” says Matt Kinsey, Toastmasters International President. “This collaboration adds tremendous value for our current members and prospective members. We are most thrilled that we can offer this pioneering speech preparation tool at no additional cost to our members,” he says. 

Through Yoodli, Toastmasters members will be able to:

• Practice, record, and store up to 60 minutes worth of speeches
• Receive analytics showing their filler words, pacing, word choice, and more
• View an auto-generated transcript of their speech
• Share a speech with others
• Play Yoodli-created word games

“We unveiled the Yoodli platform to Toastmasters’ members at the organization’s International Convention in August and the feedback was incredible,” says Varun Puri, Co-Founder of Yoodli. “We envision a world where public speaking is fun, uplifting, and collaborative as opposed to something that induces anxiety. Partnering with Toastmasters, the world’s expert in public speaking will allow us to scale our platform across the globe,” he says. 

Yoodli has secured more than $7 million in funding that it expects to last several years. Some of their investors include Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s AI Institute, Cercano Capital, and Madrona Venture Group, an early investor in Amazon.