Practicing a skill in Ovida goes beyond pressing Start. It’s your chance to slow down, look closely at how a skill actually shows up in your conversations, and try it out in new ways. By reflecting on real moments, role-playing different scenarios, and sharing insights with others, you turn practice into real progress - communication that feels stronger, clearer, and more natural in every interaction.
What can you do?
1. Reflect on a specific skill and have a focused conversation about how you did or didn’t demonstrate it in your session with a client.
Once you start a skill, Ovid (Ovida’s AI) steps in as your communication coach to guide your practice. For example, if you’re working on recognizing and exploring emotions, the AI will greet you with a supportive message like:
“Hi there! I'm your communication coach, and I'm here to help you develop your ability to recognize and explore emotions in conversations. This is such a powerful skill - when we tune into what others are feeling, we often unlock the most meaningful insights and breakthroughs.”
From here, you can:
Reflect on real sessions by sharing a recording. The AI will help you review how you demonstrated (or didn’t demonstrate) the skill in that conversation.
Have a focused conversation with the AI about your choices, your awareness, and ways to deepen the skill in future interactions.
2. Comment and collaborate with your team members
In addition to working with the AI, you can also use comments to start conversations with your team members about your meetings. This is a space for human-to-human collaboration where the AI is not involved.
Here’s how it works:
Switching modes: Use the dropdown below each meeting to choose between Ask AI or Comment.
Ask AI → Your questions and reflections go to Ovida’s AI coach for feedback.
Comment → Your messages go only to your team members. The AI cannot see this part.
Mention others: Use @mentions to tag teammates so they can join the conversation. This is a great way to invite feedback, ask for perspectives, or highlight specific moments in a session.
Collaborative reflection: By combining AI feedback with peer insights, you get the best of both worlds - structured guidance and personal input from people who know your work and context.
Keep the dialogue going: Comments stay attached to the meeting, so you and your team can revisit them later as you continue practicing the skill.
This way, you’re not practicing in isolation. You’re learning from the AI coach and building a shared learning process with your team members.
3. Role-play with Ovid, our AI agent
Another powerful way to strengthen a skill is by practicing it in a role-play session with Ovid. This gives you a safe space to experiment, make mistakes, and try new approaches without the pressure of a real client or colleague.
Here’s how it works:
Start a role-play: Select this option to begin a practice conversation with Ovida.
Choose your role: You can decide which role you'd like the AI agent to play.
Focus on your skill: As the conversation unfolds, apply the skill you’re working on - for example, asking powerful questions, recognizing emotions, or practicing active listening.
Get feedback: During the role-play, our AI agent will give you feedback on how you are deploying the skill and will even suggest ways to improve. Once you've completed the role-play, you can get detailed feedback on how you performed.
4. Score your performance against the rubric for the skill you're working on
Before you can choose to be scored, you’ll need to add a meeting to a skill.
Once your meeting has been added, you can ask the AI Skills Agent to score your performance against the rubric for your active skill.
When you choose this option, the AI Skills Agent will:
Review your meeting analysis and match your spoken behaviors to each criterion in the skill’s rubric.
Assess each line of the rubric individually, showing whether the behavior was Observed or Not Observed.
Provide a short explanation under every criterion, drawn directly from your meeting transcript, to illustrate why that behavior was or wasn’t observed.
At the end, the AI shares an overall summary, highlighting patterns such as where you demonstrated skill effectively and where opportunities for development remain.
You can continue the conversation by asking follow-up questions like “Which part should I focus on improving next?” or “Show me examples of what ‘Observed’ looks like for this skill.”
This step turns your real meeting data into a personalized performance snapshot, helping you understand precisely how you applied the skill in practice and how to refine it over time.
5. Ask AI Agent to give you some tips
At any point while working on a skill, you can ask the AI Agent for practical tips on how to strengthen your performance.
To do this, click the “Give me some tips” option from the lightbulb icon in the lower left corner.
Once selected, the AI Agent will:
Review the skill you’re working on and the behaviors it includes.
Generate personalized, actionable advice - simple techniques or phrasing you can use in your next meeting to demonstrate the skill more effectively.
Present the tips directly in the chat, in a list format, so you can read and apply them easily.
Each tip focuses on turning insight into action. For example, you may see ideas for creating checkpoints during a conversation, inviting reflection, or co-designing next steps with others. These are concise, situation-specific prompts that you can easily bring into your next real interaction.
This step helps you translate feedback into practice - keeping your learning process continuous and applied directly to your real-world conversations.
6. Check in with Ovid, our AI Agent, on your progress so far
If you want to understand how your skill is developing over time - not just how you performed in a single meeting - you can use the “Am I making progress?” feature.
Note: If you only have one meeting added to the skill, the system will prompt you that at least two meetings are required to compare your progress.
When you select this option, the AI Agent will:
Review all meetings linked to that skill, comparing how you demonstrated the rubric behaviors across each meeting.
Identify patterns of growth, such as which skill behaviors have become more consistent, and where opportunities for improvement remain.
Provide a summary, highlighting:
Strengths – areas where your performance has noticeably improved.
Ongoing challenges – behaviors that are still missing or inconsistent.
Illustrative examples – brief excerpts or timestamps from your meetings that show concrete moments of progress.
The feedback is conversational and specific, helping you see how your skill application is evolving in real interactions. For example, the AI might highlight that you’re getting stronger at one aspect of a competency while still overlooking another, or that your tone and timing in certain moments have improved.
This feature gives you a longitudinal view of your development - a snapshot of how your communication behaviors are changing from meeting to meeting, so you can track your growth and adjust your focus as you continue practicing the skill.