TalkBuddy
TalkBuddy is a conversation rehearsal tool for the scenarios that can’t be scripted around a fictional company. It puts students in difficult professional conversations before they face them for real, with real-time speech recognition and synthesis so the rehearsal feels like an actual conversation rather than a chat interface.
Why Conversation Rehearsal?
Section titled “Why Conversation Rehearsal?”Every discipline has its version of the difficult conversation — arguably the most transferable professional skill across faculties:
- Business / HR: Performance reviews, redundancies, negotiation
- Medicine / Nursing: Breaking bad news, end-of-life conversations, informed consent
- Social Work: Crisis intervention, disclosing abuse
- Law: Delivering unfavourable outcomes to clients
- Management: Conflict resolution, whistleblowing
These conversations are high-stakes, emotionally complex, and impossible to practice safely in real contexts. TalkBuddy provides a repeatable, private space to rehearse them.
How It Works
Section titled “How It Works”TalkBuddy is a client-side Electron application. Students install it on their own machine and point it at an Ollama backend (either local or provided by Cerebro in the lab). Speech-to-text and text-to-speech make the interaction feel like a real conversation.
The student selects a scenario, and TalkBuddy generates an AI character with context-appropriate behaviour. The AI doesn’t just respond — it reacts. Push back too hard and the employee gets defensive. Be too vague and the patient asks for clarification. The conversation unfolds naturally.
Deployment Options
Section titled “Deployment Options”- Desktop — Electron app installed locally, pointing at any Ollama endpoint
- Docker — Containerised deployment for lab or classroom use
- Server — Hosted instance on Cerebro for students without local GPU capability
Privacy
Section titled “Privacy”All conversation data stays local. No transcripts are sent to cloud services. Students can rehearse sensitive scenarios — a redundancy conversation, a crisis intervention — without worrying about who might see the transcript.