“Okay, I need to focus and get this done,” I muttered to myself, my eyebrows furrowing. As a teacher, I needed to familiarise myself with the ropes of Snorkl, a speech feedback tool. However, the mounting pile of responsibilities tightened its noose over me, making me breathless.

I took a deep breath and looked at the PPT slides. Taking it one step at a time, I copied and pasted my colleague’s ChatGPT-painstakingly-created prompts onto the relevant fields. It took me more time than I would have liked because I felt rushed, but finally I got the job done.

I then decided to preview it as a student. So, I pressed the record function and spoke off the cuff. Snorkl did give me some dedicated feedback, as you can see below:

Adrenaline coursed through my veins since I was trying this out for the first time. And not to mention the dopamine hit when I managed to manipulate my speech to fit the requirements of the success criteria. But ultimately — and I’m sure many Stsckers will agree with me —relying on an AI to hone one’s speaking skills seems rather contrived. Shouldn’t we encourage our young to talk to more people, step out of their comfort zone, take notes from real people?

But alas, there’s Singapore for you. We are so fixated on efficiency and productivity that we are sometimes very reluctant to develop our skills organically. But there’s another story for another time.