Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Talespin’s Virtual Humans can help teach soft skills in the workplace

Training employees how to perform specific tasks is not that difficult, but building their soft skills – like interacting with management, fellow employees and customers – can be more challenging, especially when there are no people around to practice with. One more biggest challenge for a manager is to fire an employee.

Well, a new virtual reality employee might help you there! Talespin – a company that offers virtual reality workplace training – has created Barry, an artificially intelligent character you can practice firing over and over again unless you are confident enough to handle the real deal.

Barry is a highly-realistic, AI-powered character. It appears in virtual reality, listens patiently, and then protest or sob a little like a real human as you fire him from an imaginary job. Barry is capable of simulating a range of responses that a real employee could give, such as sobbing, yelling, and more.

Meet Barry an artificially intelligent character
Meet Barry an artificially intelligent character

Along with Barry, the company has created some other VR characters to help teach people soft management skills.

While interacting with Barry, the user navigate hundreds of possible conversation paths to effectively (or ineffectively) terminate Barry, face common wrongful termination pitfalls, and experience Barry’s realistic speech, body language, and human-like mannerisms. This develops a sense of confidence to effectively deal with real scenarios, according to the blog post.

Talespin’s Virtual human tech can also be helpful in improving leadership skills, interviewing skills, navigating difficult conversations, and many more explains Kyle Jackson, CEO of Talespin. It could help you learn how to let someone go without causing a scene, for instance.

Read more: Lightweight VR glove enables you to feel and grab virtual objects

Soft skills are ranked among the most important for any organization as they discuss their needs for the future of work,” Jackson says, reports MIT Technology Review. “We don’t see this slowing down any time soon.

This could ultimately establish better employee-employer relationships and contribute to organizational growth.

Until now, we have seen the virtual reality concept in many gaming applications, gyms, massage centers, and a lot more. Let’s see how much it will be beneficial in the field of workplace training.