Figaro Analytics is an assessment, feedback and coaching platform that enables the life-long development of soft skills.
The development of a complex skill – like making a moving speech and running an empowering, energizing meeting for all – is all about trying, getting personalized, highly precise feedback, making a change, and trying again. We enable instructors, learners and executives to create a unique environment for the feedback-based learning of the most complex skills of all – those that operate in the interpersonal domain.
We use machine learning, natural language processing and signal analysis tools to enable each learner to understand WHY she comes across in one way or another – not just ‘how well’ they perform. Tone, cadence, rhythm, fluency, fluidity, expressiveness, emotional complexity, valence – all come together in creating a message– and an assessment.
For a long time now, in our institutions of higher education, learners are evaluated on written output in their courses, but are hired for the ways in which they come across in oral interviews and in-person meetings. This mismatch has led to a soft skills assessment gap, which we address directly, by making video the lingua franca of assessment.
Large language models have disrupted the routines of assessment in higher education dramatically, and will continue to do so at an increasing pace. Learners can use them to synthesize short answers, paragraphs and essays alike, in ways that are evaluated as competent by instructors and are difficult to detect as being produced by a machine by algorithms.
In the realm of social intelligence, single or simple metrics drive out diversity and produce inauthentic and automatic behaviors. We enable detailed, fine-grained feedback fromexpert coaches and instructors that takes into account the specific intention and context of each communication, and the special abilities and challenges of each learner.
