TED legends, sales trainers, speaking coaches, and a Shark Tank pitch. Over 12 hours of video, scored across four dimensions that traditional tools ignore.
Every coaching app on the market counts filler words. Yoodli, Poised, Orai, Speeko. They all treat "um" and "uh" as the primary signal of poor delivery. Our data says otherwise.
| Speaker | Talk | Filler Words | Impact Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amy Cuddy | Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are | 85 | 8/10 |
| Ken Robinson | Do Schools Kill Creativity? | 40+ | 9/10 |
| Steve Jobs | Stanford Commencement | 30+ | 9/10 |
| Simon Sinek | Start With Why | 25+ | 8/10 |
| David JP Phillips | 110 Techniques of Communication | 2 | 5/10 |
The speaker with the fewest filler words scored lowest on audience impact. The speaker with 85 filler words scored highest. If your coaching tool only counts "ums," it is steering you in exactly the wrong direction.
Amy Cuddy's 72 million views didn't happen despite her filler words. Her pauses, hesitations, and self-corrections create the texture of authentic thought. The audience reads that as real.
David JP Phillips delivered a technically flawless presentation. Near-perfect pacing, zero filler, rehearsed gesture library. His audience watched a performance, not a person.
We measure four dimensions: confidence, engagement, congruence, and impact. Congruence, whether your face, voice, and words align at any given moment, turned out to be the most revealing.
Across 14 speakers, the moments that scored highest on impact were consistently the moments with highest congruence. Not the loudest moments, not the most polished, not the ones with the best slides.
Notice that Amy Cuddy scores 5/10 on congruence but 8/10 on impact. She spends large sections of her talk in visible emotional conflict. Her face shows vulnerability while her words project authority. But the key is: when she lets the vulnerability win, the audience leans in.
Congruence isn't about always being aligned. It is about knowing when the misalignment serves you and when it undermines you.
Across our dataset, we noticed a pattern: the highest-impact moments consistently happened when speakers dropped their polished delivery.
Steve Jobs at 2:14: He pauses before telling the story about dropping out of college. His voice drops, his posture shifts, his rehearsed cadence disappears. Impact spikes to 9/10. The audience isn't watching a keynote anymore. They're listening to a person.
A sales coaching leader at 3:10: Sharing a story about nearly getting fired. Voice loses the polished edge, shoulders drop. That two-minute window is where he earns more trust than the other seven minutes of expert positioning combined.
A speaking coach at 3:54: Their face contradicts their words for the only time in the video. They say one thing while showing another. The audience feels the mismatch, even if they cannot name it. Congruence drops to 4/10.
Your audience doesn't connect with your best slides. They connect with the moments when you stop performing and start being present. Traditional coaching tools cannot see these moments because they measure surface metrics. ReadRoom measures what happens underneath.
We compared what traditional speech coaching tools flag versus what actually predicts audience impact in our data.
The difference is structural. Traditional tools take a video and output a scorecard of averages. "You said 'um' 14 times. Your average pace was 152 WPM." Useful for basic awareness. Useless for actual improvement.
ReadRoom analyzes the emotional dynamics of your delivery, moment by moment. Not what you did on average, but what happened at 2:14, at 4:43, at 8:12. The specific timestamps where your audience either connected or checked out.
| Category | Speakers | Avg. Confidence | Avg. Engagement | Avg. Congruence | Avg. Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TED / Keynotes | 5 | 6.8 | 7.4 | 7.0 | 7.8 |
| Speaking Coaches | 5 | 7.8 | 6.8 | 5.8 | 6.0 |
| Sales Leaders | 3 | 7.7 | 6.0 | 6.7 | 5.7 |
| Business Pitches | 1 | 6.0 | 8.0 | 5.0 | 7.0 |
Speaking coaches scored highest on confidence (7.8) but lowest on congruence (5.8) and impact (6.0). TED speakers scored lowest on confidence (6.8) but highest on impact (7.8). Polished delivery does not equal audience connection.
This doesn't mean coaching is broken. It means the feedback loop is broken. Coaches optimize for what tools measure (filler words, pacing, confidence). But audiences respond to what tools miss (congruence, vulnerability timing, emotional arc).
Give coaches better data, and they'll produce better speakers. That is what ReadRoom exists to do.
Upload a video. Get your confidence, engagement, congruence, and impact scored moment by moment. Not averages. Timestamps.
Get Your Analysis