Gap between 'good contributor' and 'trusted leader' is how you speak
Gestoa gives you measurable, structured practice for the moments that decide how senior you seem — the strategy presentation, the stakeholder update, the question you didn't see coming.
Practice in your browser. Perform in real life.
The room forms an opinion before you've finished your first answer.
Good ideas aren't enough if people struggle to follow them. Senior audiences look for clarity and for how well you respond under pressure. Gestoa measures the three communication skills that make the difference:
Structure & Clarity
Your audience understands pieces of what you said, but not the main point. If they have to figure out your argument themselves, you've already lost momentum.
Recovery & Stability Under Pressure
You know the answer, but the delivery of it hedges and restarts, and the pace runs. What the room takes away is weaker than what you actually know.
Body Presence
When the questions start, the body stops agreeing with the words. A gaze that drops, gestures that shrink out of frame — strong ideas land softer than they should.
Practise the rooms that decide your next role.
Three situations you’ll face throughout your career.
Senior analyst or manager
What Gestoa measures
- Recommendation stated before the supporting analysis
- Distinct sections signposted and detectable
- How early a listener could state your point
“You built to the recommendation instead of opening with it, so the exec team heard your market analysis without knowing what you wanted them to do with it. Lead with the ask, then defend it.”Project or programme lead
What Gestoa measures
- Pace steady and filler rate low while delivering the bad news
- Eye contact held with the room, not dropped to your notes
- Posture and gesture scored from in-browser landmarks — no video leaves your device
“When you reached the slipped deadline, your pace sped up, filler rate climbed, and your gaze dropped to your notes. That combination can make you sound rushed — exactly when you need the listener’s attention most.”Anyone in a senior room
What Gestoa measures
- Pace change when a question interrupts you
- Blank-moment recovery speed — seconds from stall to first clear word
- Filler rate steady across the challenge
“The CFO's question stopped you for a long stretch before you restarted, and two fillers landed before your first clear word. The pause isn't the problem; the restart is the work.”Online meetings are harder to win.
Online, people are easier to distract and harder to read, so your delivery matters even more. Gestoa trains you for the camera — and most of what you build there carries into a room.
In person
You walk into the room, shake hands, and connect from the first minute. You can see reactions, adjust your pace, and know when your message is landing.
Online
You're one face among many on a screen. It's harder to hold attention, read reactions, or build a connection, so your voice, pacing, and story matter even more.
Why online is harder
- It's harder to keep people's attention. You can't tell if someone is checking another screen, or simply losing focus.
- You get fewer signals from your audience. Small cues like eye contact, body language, or a change in expression are easy to miss, making it harder to know when to explain more—or stop talking.
- Your delivery matters more. Without the energy of being in the room, your voice, pacing, gestures, and storytelling have to create the connection.
Scenario spotlight: the stakeholder update
Skills coached: All 6 skill areas on a single run — structure, storytelling, voice, body presence, listener orientation, and recovery under pressure.
Setup
Deliver a 5-minute update on a project of your choosing. Partway through, Gestoa injects a stakeholder challenge generated from what you actually said. You respond, then finish the update.
What it evaluates
- Situation–Complication–Resolution structure, conclusion first
- Concrete detail over abstract status — the storytelling that makes it land
- Articulation rate and filler rate inside their bands
- Eye contact held and gestures open, not shrinking under the challenge
- Pace change and restart speed across the interruption
“Your resolution was crisp and the numbers landed. But the story arrived out of order — the slipped milestone came after a long stretch of abstract status — and when the challenge hit, your pace ran while your gestures shrank out of frame. Open with the slip, keep your hands up, and steady the voice. Run the Thesis First drill.”Training your team?
From a single team to an entire organisation, Gestoa's Enterprise tier adds custom scenario packs, a manager dashboard showing who's practising and where the team is collectively weakest — never an individual's level or report — plus group-level reporting.
Executive presence is a skill — and skills can be trained.
Practice in your browser. Perform in real life.
Frequently asked questions
Gestoa is a browser-based AI public speaking coach that measures how you speak, not what you say. It helps you practise public speaking, track your progress, and build stronger speaking skills over time.
Gestoa measures 6 public speaking skills:
- Voice Delivery
- Body Presence
- Structure & Clarity
- Storytelling & Persuasion
- Listener Orientation
- Recovery & Stability Under Pressure
Each skill follows a 4-level path: Foundation → Control → Expression → Mastery.
You practise in full speaking sessions: give your talk → get AI coaching → try again. Gestoa gives you a metric-backed report based on what you actually said and how you delivered it. You move to the next level when your results hold across 3 sessions in a row.
Gestoa builds on established public speaking frameworks, including the NCA Competent Speaker Speech Evaluation Form, AAC&U Oral Communication VALUE Rubric, and Toastmasters Pathways, adapted for measurable AI-powered speaking assessment.
Think Duolingo, but for public speaking.
Gestoa is for professionals who want to become better public speakers — whether you’re leading a team meeting, presenting a project, talking to a client, interviewing for a job, or pitching investors.
It’s useful for early-career professionals who want to build confidence and credibility, as well as experienced professionals who want more impact behind what they say. Founders can use it to practise investor pitches, while universities, accelerators, and nonprofits can use Gestoa to help groups develop public speaking skills.
In short, Gestoa is for anyone who wants to practise speaking, get measurable feedback, and track their progress.
You give your talk in your browser, and Gestoa scores 6 public speaking skills — from articulation and filler rate to gaze, structure, story arc, and how well you recover when interrupted.
In a full session, you give the talk twice, with AI coaching in between. Gestoa then gives you targeted drills with clear numeric pass thresholds, real-time cues like “Slow down” or “Look at camera,” and a report showing what to work on next.
No coach to schedule. Open your browser, practise, get feedback, and try again.
Gestoa turns each speaking skill into concrete, measurable signals. It tracks:
- Voice Delivery: articulation rate and filler words per 100 words.
- Body Presence: gaze, posture, and gestures that work with your voice.
- Structure & Clarity: how easily your main point can be extracted, your signposting, and your story structure.
- Storytelling: how effectively you use concrete details versus abstract ideas.
- Listener Orientation: direct address and where you use rhetorical questions.
- Recovery & Stability Under Pressure: how your pace changes after an interruption and how quickly you recover from a blank moment.
Feedback is tied to what you actually said, not a timestamp — for example: “Your filler rate spiked as you moved into your conclusion.”
Because words per minute penalizes good pauses.
Traditional pace measurement divides your words by the total speaking time, so every pause makes your WPM drop — even when you’re speaking at the right speed.
Gestoa measures articulation rate instead: how fast you speak when you’re actually speaking, with pauses excluded. This lets you pause when the moment calls for it without being penalized for your pace.
You’ll still see WPM in your report because it’s easy to understand. But it doesn’t determine your level. This keeps pace and pausing independent, so you can improve both at the same time.
No. Gestoa runs entirely in your browser with just a webcam and microphone — no download, VR headset, or app install.
It gives you structured, numerical feedback like a human coach, without the €100-an-hour price or the scheduling. Practise whenever you want — even at midnight before a morning pitch.
No audio or video is stored. Camera input is processed on your device, so no video leaves your browser — only metrics like gaze and posture scores. Your speech is transcribed, and the audio is discarded.
Your transcript is kept for 12 months to power trends, comparisons, and personalised drills, then deleted or irreversibly anonymised.
Because face analysis stays on your device, no biometric data reaches Gestoa. This privacy-by-design approach means video and audio are never transmitted in the first place.
Gestoa uses session packs, not subscriptions. Buy a bundle and use the sessions over six months:
- 5 sessions — €34
- 10 sessions — €60
- 15 sessions — €82
Larger packs lower the cost per session.
Each practice session takes up to 35 minutes: deliver your talk, get detailed feedback, review it, then deliver it again. You can speak for up to 10 minutes continuously.
Your first session is free, with no card required — and it’s a full session, not a demo.
Education, NGO, and Enterprise plans are available on request.
Most of these tools do the same core thing Gestoa does. Yoodli, Orai, Speeko, and Microsoft Speaker Coach all measure pace and filler words, and several also analyse body language.
So feedback itself isn’t the main difference. Gestoa stands apart in two ways.
First, breadth. Gestoa scores 47 metrics across 6 skills — from filler rate and pace to how quickly a listener can state your point, whether your story arc closes, and how well you recover when challenged. It builds on established frameworks including the NCA Competent Speaker Speech Evaluation Form, AAC&U Oral Communication VALUE Rubric, and Toastmasters Pathways, adapted for measurable AI-powered speaking assessment.
Second, progression. In most tools, you get a score and decide for yourself whether you’re improving. In Gestoa, the numbers are the gate. A skill advances only when its thresholds hold across 3 sessions in a row, including one session based on material Gestoa chooses rather than a talk you’ve rehearsed.
A coach beats Gestoa at the things that require human judgement: whether your argument is strong, how to read a specific room, and the work behind real stage fear.
Gestoa wins on repetition and measurement. An hour with a coach costs €100 to €200 and gives you one run at your talk. A €82 Gestoa pack gives you 15 measured sessions you can run whenever you want — even at 11pm the night before.
A coach might say, “That was better.” That judgement matters, but it can vary from session to session. Gestoa uses the same metrics every time, so you can see your filler rate, gaze, and other signals moving in the same direction over a month. That’s what makes a level-up meaningful.
And because there’s no one in the room, you’re more likely to practise the honest version of your talk, not the safe one.
Many coaches use tools like Gestoa for extra practice between sessions — not instead of coaching.
No — and that won’t change. Gestoa scores how you deliver your talk: voice, body presence, structure, storytelling, listener orientation, and recovery under pressure. It doesn’t open your deck or comment on its design.
Practise the talk you’d give with the deck behind you. If you want your slides reviewed, use a dedicated pitch-deck reviewer — that’s a different job.
Advancement is metric-based, not judged by a mentor. When your numbers hold across 3 sessions in a row, you move up a level.
One in every three sessions uses a scenario Gestoa chooses, so you can’t level up by practising the same rehearsed talk every time.
You won’t pass every session, so moving up typically takes around 5 sessions — roughly a week per skill with 24-hour spacing. And levels can move down as well as up.
Every level-up is backed by numbers you can see and track.
Yes. Gestoa lets you practise real situations you’re about to face, not generic exercises: presenting a project update, making your case on a client call, handling pushback from a senior colleague, or answering a behavioural interview question using STAR.
Gestoa adds realistic pressure, including an unexpected challenge mid-flow, and scores how you actually come across — your clarity, pace, filler words, vocal energy, posture, gestures, eye contact, and how you recover when interrupted.
After each session, it gives you the exact drill to practise next.