Profile: Retorio-The Human AI That Can Read Your Personality
Every day, people have to encounter complex situations that require them to explain precisely and carefully so that their answers will not be seen as false or incoherent. Those types of situations would include explaining past experiences and skill-sets at a job interview or giving a speech about a current political or financial problem.
This is where Retorio comes in and it is an AI-based startup that develops technology which can understand communication skills and personality type by using a machine learning algorithm that analyses people's communication behavior from videos. It will then critique the individuals' “performance” against the criteria they have chosen so that it can help them practice for office presentations and/or personal conversations through brutally honest feedback.
Retorio can be used as a plugin on job application forms to allow companies to get instant feedback on applicants' communication behavior and key personality traits. This will allow companies to save time, money, and resources from hiring candidates that may turn out to be a wrong fit in the future, which in turn will allow the candidates themselves to apply for a company, organization, or firm that matches their work culture and career goals.
Retorio’s technology is developed to teach people how to conduct proper communication that can help them navigate through certain situations easily by structuring communication based on the personality of the individual. The main objective of Retorio is to help individuals communicate confidently in every situation without having to change the way they express their personality because the startup wants each person to continue expressing their themselves in a comfortable way, regardless if it’s a job interview, a date, or just simply a meet up with relatives.
The startup was founded two months ago in Munich, Germany as a private IPO by Abdurrahman Namli, Christoph Hohenberger, and Patrick Ohler. Aside from its main purpose as a developer of AI technology, Retorio also conducts operations in E-Learning, Ed-Tech, Human-Computer Interaction, Human Resources, and Machine Learning, particularly when one of the AI’s main features include identifying the individual’s face, voice, gesture, and language before the AI provides the individual some communication feedback.
Although the startup has only been in existence for two months, it has already been chosen by TechCrunch as one of its top picks in its Disrupt Berlin 2018 event. TechCrunch’s Disrupt Berlin 2018 event provides an opportunity for some of Europe’s best-performing and emerging startups to showcase their innovative ideas throughout the continent (and potentially outside of Europe) and Retorio’s technology can be beneficial for the individuals present at the event, especially the other startup CEOs, to practice their communication whenever they need to present their ideas or products coherently to a large audience.
For me personally, I grew up not being able to express myself confidently because coming from an East Asian culture, I was taught to always remain humble and do my work diligently without expressing any complaint, even if there is something that obviously looks unfair to me. Even though I started to be a little more open as a communicator in high school, I was still having internal fears about communicating with larger audiences, whether if it’s a school-wide speech or in a class presentation, because I was scared that I would say something that didn’t make sense and have my peers laugh at me.
The purpose of Retorio can help people who share the same communication problems that I once had to express themselves in a confident manner because its technology is designed to show people which parts of their communication style are working well and which parts they certainly need improvement on. Retorio’s AI-based technology serves to boost confidence in individuals who had doubts in their abilities as public speakers and can help them to not only become the best-performing employees in the workforce but also helps maintain and create personal relationships that are important to their personal growth.