As we reach the midpoint of 2025, it’s the perfect time to reflect on your progress and revisit the professional development goals you set at the start of the year. Whether you’ve been working on improving communication, building confidence, or becoming a more effective team player, now’s a great moment to celebrate how far you’ve come – and decide where you want to grow next.
At VirtualSpeech, we’re passionate about helping develop soft skills that truly make a difference. Over the last six months, we’ve introduced a range of exciting updates to meet both technological advancements and the evolving needs of our clients and the market.
These updates include faster response times, smarter feedback tools, and improved dashboard analytics, all designed to help you learn, reflect, and apply your skills more effectively than ever before.
Maybe one of these new features is the next step in your learning journey.
As you can see, we’ve been busy! There’s too much to pack into one video, so keep scrolling to explore the new features and upgrades we’ve introduced over the past six months, and, most importantly, what they mean for your learning journey.
Realtime Conversations
Our Roleplay Exercises have always been well-received and praised for how realistic and impactful they feel. But we wanted to take realism a step further. That’s why we recently introduced Realtime Conversations – a major upgrade available in both VR and online.
This new mode improves conversation flow, encourages quicker thinking, and delivers a more immersive, dynamic experience. It’s especially powerful for handling emotionally charged or sensitive topics, such as delivering disappointing news about a promotion, as shown in the video below.
Manual Mode remains available alongside Realtime Conversations and continues to be an excellent choice for learners; it works particularly well for structured scenarios such as sales pitches or presentations.
AI Coach
Delivering in-depth, actionable feedback has always been central to the VirtualSpeech experience. After all, feedback is one of the most powerful tools for growth. Gallup found that employees who receive consistent feedback show up to 22% higher engagement in the workplace.
But we didn’t want feedback to be just a passive add-on to an otherwise immersive learning journey. So we asked: What happens after the feedback is given?
That’s where reflection comes in. Research published by BMC Medical Education shows that reflective practice can improve knowledge retention by as much as 78%, yet it’s often overlooked in digital training experiences.
To support this, we’ve integrated an AI Coach directly into the practice experience, designed to enhance the learner journey by delivering a complete learning loop: practice, receive feedback, reflect, and apply.
After each roleplay, learners are invited into a coaching session where they can openly reflect on their performance. The AI Coach “remembers” what both you and the AI Avatar said during the exercise, and can even quote specific parts of the conversation to reinforce the feedback. It also draws on detailed performance metrics, like speaking speed, filler words, tone, and clarity, to provide context and depth.
Learners can ask specific questions about their feedback, discuss different tactics to the scenario, and explore different ways to improve. By making reflection an interactive, personalised experience, the AI Coach helps transform feedback into meaningful action.
Roleplay Studio
While VirtualSpeech offers over 55 ready-to-use scenarios, we know that some learning needs are highly specific. That’s where Roleplay Studio comes in.
With our easy-to-use scenario builder, you can create your own AI-powered roleplays in just minutes, no coding or scripting required. Whether you’re an educator designing exercises for a specific course or part of an enterprise team training staff on internal policies and communication protocols, Roleplay Studio helps you tailor simulations to match your exact needs.
You can fully customise the scenario prompt, impact feedback, and scoring criteria, and choose from a wide range of immersive environments, such as a Doctor’s Office, Press Conference, Event Space, and many more. With Roleplay Studio, creating realistic, relevant training content takes minutes, not months.
Multiavatar Roleplays
Not every conversation happens one-on-one, and now your training exercises don’t have to either. With the introduction of Multiavatar Roleplays, VirtualSpeech brings a new level of realism and complexity to immersive learning.
By interacting with multiple AI avatars in a single scenario, learners can practice handling group dynamics and consider how elements like eye contact, body language, and conversation structure shift in a multi-person setting.
Scenarios range from panel interviews and board meetings to the popular Pitch Masters: Investor Challenge. Inspired by Shark Tank and Dragon’s Den, Pitch Master invites learners to present their business idea to a panel of avatars, each asking in-depth questions, covering everything from the core concept to market positioning and the financials behind the pitch.
Each Multiavatar Roleplay is supported by AI-powered feedback and a follow-up AI Coaching session, offering learners a complete learning loop that reflects the realities of high-stakes, real-world communication.
The Art of Teamwork
The Art of Teamwork is the latest course in our growing catalogue, joining favourites like Public Speaking Mastery and Difficult Conversations. This new course is designed to help learners improve collaboration by understanding and adapting to different communication styles, a key factor in effective teamwork.
Drawing inspiration from Carl Jung’s psychological types, the course introduces four color-based communication styles: Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green. Each colour represents a unique set of traits, preferences, and approaches to communication.
Learners gain a comprehensive understanding of their own style, including their dominant color and the percentage breakdown across all four styles. This self-awareness serves as a foundation for enhancing communication with others, particularly those who have differing and sometimes even conflicting styles.
Next, the course helps learners identify how to adapt and collaborate with the different colors, work more effectively in teams, and navigate difficult group dynamics. Immersive roleplay exercises and scenario-based activities reinforce the learning, enabling users to practice communicating with the various styles in a mistake-safe environment.
The goal is that The Art of Teamwork will help learners build stronger, more empathetic, and more productive working relationships, resulting in a more collaborative and engaged team.
You can access a free taster color personality quiz here.
New Feedback Design
Every practice exercise and roleplay now delivers more in-depth, actionable feedback, providing learners with greater insight into their performance than ever before.
Our enhanced feedback system offers detailed score breakdowns into key elements such as clarity, pace, body language, and more. Helping users understand exactly what impacts their overall score and identify targeted areas for skill improvement. These categories adapt depending on the type of exercise, ensuring feedback is relevant and tailored. For example, the Roundup video highlights the body language analytics, showing different hand movement patterns and a left-right percentage split.
Learners receive feedback in a clear, easy-to-understand summary by default, with the option to access a more detailed analysis. Both summary and detailed reports can be reviewed either as text or audio, accommodating different learning preferences and giving our learners the best experience.
New Visual Elements: New Avatars and New Environments
Over the last six months, we’ve made some exciting visual upgrades to enhance your practice experience.
We’ve listened closely to your requests for more diversity and now offer avatars that represent a wider range of ages, genders, and ethnicities, helping you connect with more realistic and relatable roleplay partners.
On top of that, we’ve added new environments to practice in, including a wedding/events space, a press conference setting, and a new meeting room, giving you fresh, varied spaces to build your skills with confidence.
Presentation Customization
Presentation practice can now be customized to the individual’s choosing, with different options available in the different rooms and scenarios.
Choose whether to hold a microphone or stand in the spotlight, and control audience distractions like coughing or phone noises, as a few examples. You can even adjust elements like audience size and manage audience questions in applicable scenarios.
For VR users, there’s an added level of control. Drag and drop windows in the interface to arrange elements like text prompts and presentation slides exactly where you want them. And if needed, you can quickly reset everything back to the default layout anytime without leaving the exercise.
This means your practice environment works around you, helping you focus on what matters most: delivering your best presentation.
More Language Options
As demand increases, we continually add more compatible languages to the platform. Learners can now engage in roleplay in over 15 languages, with more languages expected to be added in the future. This means that if your organization has teams in various geographical locations who speak different languages, you can be confident that they are all receiving the same high-quality training.
This means if your organization has teams in multiple geographical locations, speaking different languages, you can be reassured that they are all getting the same quality training.
Improved Admin Dashboard
We’ve given the VirtualSpeech Admin Dashboard a significant overhaul, making it easier to use while offering more in-depth data and analytics on your learners’ progress.
The new dashboard provides a clearer overview of overall usage, as well as deeper insights into specific learning behaviors. You can now track how learners are interacting with the platform across categories such as roleplay types and presentation room usage.
It is now easier than ever to learn how often a team member practices, how far they are through a course, or how they’re performing over time. Every learner has an individual analytics profile, compiling user stats and progress tracking. Additionally, you can now access Leaderboards that let you quickly identify top performers across your organization.
We’ve also streamlined license management based on feedback from our customers. It’s now simpler to assign licenses, including a bulk upload feature that allows you to add users via a spreadsheet in just a few clicks.
Finding completed exercises is now more intuitive, with a dedicated section and improved search functionality. Each practice session includes more detailed analytics, such as performance score, session length, and frequency of suggested response usage. You can also review transcripts, download recordings, and save results – all from a single screen.
By giving you greater access to usage statistics, easier navigation of shared exercises, and a more user-friendly layout, the dashboard makes it simpler to measure impact, track progress, and clearly demonstrate ROI on learning and development initiatives.
Conclusion
2025 has already been a transformative year for VirtualSpeech, packed with new features, major upgrades, and deeper learning insights. From Realtime Conversations and AI Coaching to improved feedback, multiavatar roleplays, and powerful admin tools, everything we’ve launched has been designed to elevate your learning experience.
But we’re not stopping here.
What’s next for VirtualSpeech? You’ll be the first to know when it’s ready.
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Or, if these upgrades have shown you that VirtualSpeech could be the right fit for your organization, book a demo with our team. We would love to help you on your journey with immersive learning.
