Mind the “Uuh” is a project by
Benedikt Groß, Maik Groß and Thibault Durand

Mind the “Uuh” is an experimental training device helping everyone to become a better public speaker. The cute little compagnon is listening to your speech aiming to make you aware of “uuh” fill words, because these fillers are easy to avoid once you start noticing them. Now everytime you give a presentation and you say “uuh” – you will be aware :)

The prototype of Mind the “Uuh” was carefully designed as simple as possible: There is a bell, a volume knob which controls how hard the bell is hit or to turn it silent, a counter for your “uuh” stats and a reset button. The product design is deliberately making references to a classic alarm clock and a volume knob, to convey the nature of Mind the “Uuh” intuitively.

For the detection of the “uuh”s the device runs a custom trained machine learning model, trained on 1500 samples of various durations from 300ms to 1 sec. This proof of concept model will notice distinctive “uuh” fillers but ignore very short utterances. All speech data is processed directly on device, nothing is sent to the cloud.

Mind the “Uuh” is a fun project for Google’s TensorFlow Microcontroller Challenge.

👀 Mind the “Uuh” on Github