Using AI to Make Yourself a Better Speaker with Esha Joshi

Show Notes

Audio Transcript 

Esha Joshi: And the challenge with this is there is some behavior change involved, because not only is practice one component of it, the other component is hearing yourself and watching yourself back, which is cringeworthy. Nobody likes to hear themselves. Nobody likes to have flaws or issues pointed out in their speaking. That said, I believe that is the key to becoming a better speaker because you can understand your speaking tics and use that as leverage to figure out what you need to spend time and effort working on and how you can improve in the future.

Bart Egnal: Welcome to the Inspire podcast, where we examine what it takes to intentionally inspire.

Bart Egnal: I'm your host, Bart Egnal, president and CEO of The Humphrey Group. And if you've ever asked yourself how you can develop an authentic leadership presence or tell stories that have people hanging off every word, well, this podcast is for you. It's not just for executives. This is a podcast for anyone who wants to influence and inspire others in their work and life. My guest on today's episode of the Inspire podcast is Esha Joshi. Esha, you have a lot of titles, so we need to do you justice. First and foremost, you’re the co-founder of Yoodli, which is an AI-powered speech coach. We'll talk more about that in a moment. You also serve as the chief product officer for Yoodli and in your spare time, the president. Esha joins me from Seattle.

Bart Egnal: Esha, welcome to the Inspire podcast.

Esha Joshi: Hey, Bart. Thanks so much for inviting me here. I am excited to chat with you and see where this conversation goes.

Bart Egnal: For those listening, I just had to get you on the pod because if you follow the Humphrey Group, you know that we have proudly launched in early 2024, Eli, which is our AI-powered speech coach. Eli is not our creation but an adaptation of Yoodli, the AI-powered speech coach that your company founded. We’re excited about how what you've built has been fused with our approach to teaching leadership communication to help our clients internalize what we teach when we can't be there. So I wanted to have you on because you and your team are at the leading edge of building tools that let AI help improve speaking.

Bart Egnal: So, in a very short time, how would you describe Yoodli and what the concept of it is?

Esha Joshi: Awesome. Thank you for the introduction. As Bart mentioned, my name is Esha, and I'm the co-founder of Yoodli. Y-O-O-D-L-I. I always like to spell it out. The context behind Yoodli is we are building the Grammarly for speech. You can think of us as your private, real-time, and judgment-free AI speech coach. In fact, I'm using it on this call right now. It's showing up on my screen and giving me feedback as I'm speaking. It's saying, "Esha, slow down, you’re speaking a little too fast," or "Be mindful of your use of filler words." So that’s the context with Yoodli. We are incredibly excited and privileged to be partnering with the Humphrey Group to help augment the coaching and teaching they do with their clients. We aim to help people become more confident communicators. That’s the ethos behind Yoodli, and I’m excited to find other people in the world, including Bart and his team, who also feel strongly about this mission.

Bart Egnal: That’s such a great summary and so cool that you’re running it live here. I’ve been using it in my Zoom meetings. I’ll have to get cued into how to run it with my podcast to get some judgment-free coaching. We were excited at the Humphrey Group when we met you and connected with you last year because our work has always been about working with our clients, coaching them. They always say things like, "Oh, I wish you could be there all the time. I wish you could coach me all the time," and we just can’t. This partnership allows us to have your coach adapted and incorporate our intellectual capital, helping our clients. The response has been great, so we'll get into it more.

Bart Egnal: But let's talk about you. I want you to take me through how you got to this point, because I know this isn't your first gig. So where did your career start, and how did it lead you to founding Yoodli?

Esha Joshi: I’m originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. My background is actually as a software engineer. I spent a lot of time right after college working as a software engineer at Apple. I’ve always been a very analytical thinker. I like creating things, building things with my hands, and coming up with new ideas. This career trajectory hasn’t been completely off from what I always thought. Admittedly, I was very privileged to grow up in the Bay Area as tech was blossoming in the late nineties, which likely influenced my decision to go into tech. I saw the impact of how just a little bit of work and ideation could change people's worlds. That’s what got me excited. I often tell folks that my decision to become an engineer was mainly because of indecision. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to be in technology, and software engineering seemed like a sure method to get into this field. Out of all the decisions 18-year-old Esha made, that was probably the best one.

Bart Egnal: There you go. Pat yourself on the back.

Esha Joshi: Thank you. After college, I spent a couple of years working at Apple. I was based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and a little bit in London, working on launching Apple TV, Apple's version of Netflix. If you've heard of Ted Lasso or The Morning Show, those are examples.

Bart Egnal: You’re responsible for killing a lot of my evenings with very enjoyable entertainment, is what you’re saying.

Esha Joshi: Well, I’m sorry for using the word killing. I hoped you would say you love Ted Lasso.

Bart Egnal: I do love Ted Lasso. In all seriousness, Apple TV is one of my favorite streaming services. The quality is great. My wife and I binge-watched The Morning Show. That was our first taste of it. So, yes, some great stuff came out of your work.

Esha Joshi: I’m really happy to hear that. In fact, Ted Lasso has given me a lot of inspiration on how to be a business leader. I've learned more about certain traits of leadership from Ted Lasso than from other books and TED talks.

Bart Egnal: Just be a goldfish.

Esha Joshi: Exactly. I will say that being at the intersection of tech and entertainment was challenging for me. Just given how entertainment rolls, I have so much respect for the creativity happening at that intersection. Professionally, I’ve been very passionate about three things. First, I've always wanted to start my own company since leaving college. It’s just a dream that I’ve had—a desire to work on something impactful. Second, I care a lot about helping people, particularly women, with their confidence. Historically, that meant working with younger girls and teaching them how to code. This was back when I was working more as a software engineer. It gave me a lot of joy seeing younger girls’ faces light up when they could run a few lines of code and see something magical appear on the screen. I’ve always wanted to bring that about or work with people who bring that about in others. Lastly, communication skills are very important to me. There is something special about how people can use words to command an audience and get attention. Today, we see it used in nefarious ways, which is no good. But when someone has a great message to share and uses the stage as a platform to communicate and inspire change, that’s lovely. These three passions led me to quit my job at Apple and start Yoodli, bringing us to today.

Bart Egnal: I love your three passions. The second and third ones align very much with our work at the Humphrey Group. We've had a longstanding niche in supporting the advancement of women through training in leadership communication skills with a DEI lens. Our program for women leaders, Taking the Stage, goes back over 20 years because we know that women are underrepresented in leadership and undercompensated relative to their male peers. There are major systemic issues, and while we don’t tackle those from an organizational or societal perspective, we do work with women leaders to help them get the credit and voice they deserve. It’s neat that your commitment to equity and advancing women continues to renew itself, and obviously, the need is still there.

Bart Egnal: When you quit Apple, did you already have the idea for Yoodli, or did you come up with it afterward?

Esha Joshi: I did have the idea for Yoodli. During the pandemic, while I was still working at Apple, I noticed people being mindful of their communication in a virtual setting. The pandemic was the first major shift towards everything being virtual, and virtual communication is different from in-person communication. It’s somewhat easier, somewhat harder. I noticed that without being strategic as a communicator, some people were going under the radar, which bothered me. I felt this way for myself and for others who weren’t as confident but deserved promotions, salary raises, or jobs. The ethos behind Yoodli was knowing there needed to be a platform or resource to help people improve their communication, whatever their use case might be. I left Apple with this intention in mind, not knowing the exact form factor Yoodli would take. That’s part of the journey of starting a company—you figure it out as you go.

Bart Egnal: You had a co-founder, Varun. How did you two connect, and when did the first iteration of Yoodli launch?

Esha Joshi: Varun and I have been colleagues for a while. We first met at a college internship at Intuit a few years ago. We became friends and stayed in touch. He had a similar experience with communication, coming from India. He saw many people from India who didn’t get the jobs they deserved. Varun’s background is that he worked at Google for a few years before Yoodli, and he wanted to help people in India have accessible resources to get job opportunities they might not have gotten without proper English and communication skills.

Bart Egnal: That’s a great backstory into how Yoodli came into being.

Bart Egnal: For those listening who haven’t yet used Yoodli or Eli, our AI-powered speech coach incorporating our intellectual capital, how does it work? Let’s imagine someone listening wants to start using it. How do they begin, and what does it do?

Esha Joshi: Great question. There are a few ways to get started with Yoodli. The first and most obvious is if you have an upcoming speaking moment—a speech, an interview, a sales pitch—you want feedback on. You can come to Yoodli and start practicing. The idea is to simulate a role play with an AI persona. You get real-time AI questions, follow-up questions, or even objections if it’s a sales pitch. At the end, you receive feedback on parameters like tone, pitch, intonation, use of disfluencies, body language, posture, gesture, content structure, etc. Regarding partnerships with coaching companies like the Humphrey Group, we have worked with you to build a bespoke AI bot that takes in your best practices and learning methodology, replicating them in an AI form factor. So when coaches and trainers can’t physically be there, or if we want to sustain learned material, someone can practice, get feedback from the Humphrey bot incorporating your material, and continue training with your best practices in mind.

Bart Egnal: That’s a great summary. I love your mention of practice. Another thing I often have Yoodli join my Zoom meetings. It’s like a ghost in the background, scoring your effectiveness in the session. It gives you a report, telling you about your conciseness, pacing, sentence starters, repetitions, etc. You get the long-term trends and can begin to shift your behavior. We enjoy incorporating our intellectual capital around having a clear message, structure, call to action, and using inclusive language. It’s a cool tool and the future of communication. It may not replace high-touch experiences, but communication is so frequent and fast now that exposure therapy becomes essential. Maybe you could expand on that idea of exposure therapy?

Esha Joshi: Absolutely. And, Bart, you mentioned earlier that Yoodli provides AI feedback and coaching, but it’s never meant to replace the human coach. We believe there’s value in getting feedback for self-sufficient learning and mastery when coaches aren’t available. However, human feedback is invaluable, whether from a coach, partner, buddy, mentor, or friend. Humans offer authenticity and context that AI cannot, and shouldn’t, provide. So, practice with AI when humans aren’t available, but get human feedback at some point.

Esha Joshi: Speaking is like any other skill requiring practice, discipline, focus, and motivation. Hearing yourself and watching yourself back is cringeworthy, but it’s key to understanding your speaking tics and improving. Exposure therapy is about getting multiple tries at getting comfortable with speaking.

Bart Egnal: I totally agree. Watching yourself is a painful process, but fundamentally important. I recently did a workshop with senior executive bankers, and they were apprehensive about videotaping. I told them it wasn’t to torture them, but to help them see themselves through the audience's eyes. Initially, projecting connection and presence doesn’t feel natural, but it’s necessary. For example, the power of the pause feels like eternity to speakers but is a blink of an eye to the audience. It resolves cognitive dissonance over time, making you realize the pause is great. We can do workshops once or twice a month, but Eli offers daily practice, which is invaluable.

Esha Joshi: Yes, absolutely. And you can practice the significance of the power of the pause or improve lateral thinking for speaking on the fly, small talk, or networking. These are important facets of communication beyond prepared speaking events.

Bart Egnal: What is the tool telling you right now about your speaking? Is it mapping mine too? What are we doing well or should do differently?

Esha Joshi: I mentioned one primary use case is practice or roleplay. Another is bringing Yoodli into calls to provide analytics on speaking and summarizing conversations. The third option is the desktop app, which I’m using now. It gives me private feedback during meetings, recording only me. My screen sharing doesn’t show the dashboard to others. It’s telling me I should ask more questions.

Bart Egnal: It doesn’t know you’re in a podcast and supposed to be answering. We’ll give you a pass on that.

Esha Joshi: Correct. It doesn’t have the context of me being an interviewee. I’ll have to tell it afterward.

Bart Egnal: So you’re not an arrogant, self-centered person who just wants to talk about themselves.

Esha Joshi: Exactly. It also told me I tend to start my sentences with “so,” and I had some awkward pauses. But it commended my use of the rule of threes when describing my three passions.

Bart Egnal: Kudos to you. I liked that part too. It’s super cool to get that real-time feedback. We’ll have to discuss that dashboard more. People can get a sense of the tool.

Bart Egnal: Let’s talk about the broader context. You play in the cool space of AI and tools. Last week, I attended an event where Zach Cass from OpenAI spoke about AI’s future and its profound societal changes. He mentioned some elements that AI won’t replicate, becoming more critical in human communication. What do you think will become more valuable and special about human communication?

Esha Joshi: Great question. People often think of AI as replacing excess. For example, AI can draft a marketing email or rewrite an email in your voice. People worry about job losses, but in functions where words and communication are vital, clarity of thinking is most important. AI helps by distilling core messages, but humans bring clarity and transform those messages. In an ocean of words, clarity of thinking is crucial, even with AI.

Bart Egnal: I agree. I’ll add that inspiring ideas will remain a human domain. AI can condense thinking, but conceiving ideas that energize and lead is uniquely human. In a world of unlimited AI content, the essence of ideas people want to hear becomes precious. This fusion of tools like Eli and human ideas is the future. AI can coach and provide feedback, but human ideas inspire.

Esha Joshi: I agree. As AI mesmerizes us, we must remember that humans drive change and action. AI makes jobs easier but can’t replace human creativity and brainpower.

Bart Egnal: Absolutely. We should clarify that this interview isn’t between AI personas.

Esha Joshi: It would be funny if it were, like, “Jokes on you. This was AI Bart and AI Esha talking together.”

Bart Egnal: The Skynet podcast.

Esha Joshi: Way to make it dark, Bart. Way to make it dark.

Bart Egnal: Not yet. We’re not going down without a fight.

Bart Egnal: Esha, so much has been built in the few years since you created Yoodli and partnered with us to create Eli. What’s next? What do you see for product development in the next two to three years?

Esha Joshi: That’s a good question and something that keeps me up. Generally, we’re moving towards helping coaches continue their coaching through Yoodli and scalable, asynchronous coaching. Right now, you practice on Yoodli with an AI voice avatar and get feedback as if a Humphrey coach were sitting next to you. In the future, we could have interactive, immersive conversations with AI avatars, embedding Eli into curriculums, homework assignments, and learning plans. Our goal is to make speaking and coaching easier and more accessible through a coaching platform, augmenting human coaches.

Bart Egnal: Many clients have asked for a Bart bot or doll in their office. We’re getting closer to that vision with the Bart Eli Yoodli doll in all its glory.

Esha Joshi: Absolutely. You could customize the Bart doll, the bots, or whomever based on the kind of code.

Bart Egnal: That’s right.

Esha Joshi: Exactly. Exactly.

Bart Egnal: And the future is bright as long as we don’t use Scarlett Johansson’s voice to give it voice, right?

Esha Joshi: Yeah. Truly. Truly.

Bart Egnal: That’s right. Well, Esha, thank you so much for coming on the Inspire podcast. This was a great conversation. I encourage everyone to follow you on LinkedIn, check out Yoodli, visit the Humphrey Group site, and get hooked up with Eli. This is just the beginning of great things in coaching. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Esha Joshi: It has been so fun chatting with you. Thank you very much. I’m excited to keep collaborating and keeping the conversation going.

Bart Egnal: Just getting started. Thanks a lot. I hope you enjoyed that episode of the Inspire podcast and the conversation I had with our guest. Hopefully, you left with some practical, tangible tools and tips to be more consistently inspirational. If you’re enjoying the pod, I’ll ask you a favor. Please rate and review it. I love the comments, appreciate the reviews, and the visibility allows others to discover the pod. It’s how word of mouth has spread the Inspire podcast to so many listeners and helped us keep making this great content. Stay tuned. We’ll be back in two weeks with another inspiring conversation. Thanks so much for listening. Go forth and inspire.