The AI Coach
Practical and humanistic ways to utilise Coaching apps, Emotion-sensing AI, Coaching “Bots”, and other new technology in your coaching and personal development.
- Use Emotion AI on a platform such as Zoom to understand and improve the responses you get from clients and students, as well as to learn from your own responses.
- Use an AI powered Coaching App to experience your own personal development in privacy, and to provide coaching clients or students with additional support and added value from their sessions with you.
- Understand and utilise AI prompts to create more effective supportive advertising, audio-visual aids and written material for your clients.
- Understand the advantages, challenges and ethical principles needed to get the most out of emerging AI technology.
What apps will we be using? (No need to sign up for these yet!)
- ChatGPT (Core AI program especially for editing text and generating images) Free version.
- Rocky AI (AI Coach and Mentoring program) Free version.
- MorphCast (Emotional Recognition AI program) Free version via Zoom.
- Mureka AI (Song creation program) Free version – single song.
- Freepik AI (Image and Video generation, Lipsynch, voice cloning, video character creation etc) Free version for images, US$8 paid for the monthly subscription gives you one month access to all core systems, with 84,000 credits, cancellable any time (n.b. NOT the annual subscription which is perhaps slightly misleadingly advertised as $5 per month, but will then charge you $60 and sign you up for the entire year).
To get the full benefit from this training you would need to sign up for these 5 services. You will be able to do that at the training, so long as you have an email that you can verify your address on, and have passwords ready (if you are signed in to a service like Google Chrome, it will autogenerate passwords if you want). There is no need to pre-enrol with these services. You can of course cancel your subscription to all services immediately afterwards. The free versions are genuinely free, however, and provide most of what you would want. In the case of Freepik, you would have your credits available to use up even if you cancel re-subscription immediately.
The Background
Emotion-Sensing AI: For some years we have known that AI can analyse someone’s Facebook posts and diagnose clinical depression as accurately as a Psychiatrist. Now, apps like Morphcast, MoodMe and Emotion AI plug into Zoom and use the audio/video information to assess your participants’ breathing patterns, facial expressions, voice tonality and eye movements and give an assessment of their engagement (are they paying attention to you), their emotional state (are they happy, sad or angry, for example), and much more. The apps give real time information as you interact, so you can adjust mid-sentence, and then assess the entire session giving feedback about which comments shifted their responses etc. The apps say they specifically use neurodivergent people in their training of the AIs, so that the emotional assessment also works for people who are differently wired. Apps like MoodMirror enable you to keep your own video journal and track your own emotional development.
Coaching Bots: Meanwhile, AI coaching programs like Rocky AI (created by Harry Novic in 2019) and Optify (created by Pam Krulitz and others in 2018) offer the corporate world coaching experiences where some or all of the coaching is done by an interactive discussion with an AI in written chat and/or spoken language. In this context the human coach needs to be able to explain and support the client utilising the AI coaching process, and decide where and if person-person intervention is needed: a whole new role. Preliminary research suggests that AI coaching can have both advantages (e.g. some people will feel safer discussing issues with a confidential AI rather than with a person who has their own emotional and values responses; the AI never sleeps and so can be accessed just as easily in different time zones; the cost of AI coaching is dramatically lower than person to person costs) and challenges or limits (e.g. the privacy of recordings of sessions needs absolute clarity, the method requires human coaches to “let go” of some of their “control of sessions”, many clients still have fears that a machine cannot be as empathic in response as a real human). Even ChatGPT makes an elegant coach, by the way.
Using AI Tools: Finally, AI apps like ChatGPT have made accessible a number of tools useful to coaches just as they are useful to anyone wanting to share their ideas in a way that makes sense to clients. AI can create written material that summarises and explains things. It can create images, videos, music and songs to convey ideas. It creates plans for sessions with particular clients. It helps you write letters to clients that sound professional and yet warm. As people access these creative skills via their computers more and more, the successful coach will be able to use them to create a rich multi-sensory experience for clients before, during and after sessions.
Some Questions? Is this the future of coaching and therapy? Does it make some NLP/coaching training obsolete? Can it speed up NLP/coaching expertise development? Is it pseudoscience? Is it creepy? Is it infringing on privacy? Finally, are you interested in a training on its ethical use?
