Mind the “Uuh” – Train yourself to avoid using uuh fill words

Created by Benedikt Groß, Maik Groß and Thibault Durand, Mind the “Uuh” is an experimental training device helping everyone to become a better public speaker. The device is constantly listening to the sound of your voice, aiming to make you aware of “uuh” fill words.

The prototype of Mind the “Uuh” was carefully designed as simple as possible: There is a bell, a volume knob which controls how hard the bell is hit or to turn it silent, a counter for your “uuh” stats and a reset button. The product design is deliberately making references to classic alarm clocks to convey the nature of Mind the “Uuh” intuitively.

For the detection of the “uuh”s the device runs a custom trained machine learning model with Edge Impulse Studio on a free account, trained on 1500 samples of various durations from 300ms to 1 sec. This proof of concept model will notice distinctive “uuh” fillers but ignore very short utterances. All speech data is processed directly on device, nothing is sent to the cloud.

Created with Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, a bell, Tower Pro SG51R servo, standard seven segment display (sourced via 74HC595 shift register / drain via TPIC6B595) and 3d printed PLA housing.

Mind the “Uuh” was created for Google’s TensorFlow Microcontroller Challenge.