LD and PF Club Team registration for the 2022-2023 debate season is now open!
I am Arda Altintepe, a current junior and the head outreach director of the debate team at Horace Mann in NYC. As a personal project, I began coding PublicForumAI at the beginning of 2024 and have recently expanded it for public use. Will Gonzalez, another member of the PF debate team at my school, now helps me with promotion and having PublicForumAI reach as many debaters who need it as possible.
Contact us here:
william_gonzalez@horacemann.org
PublicForumAI.com is a free AI-powered website where users can flow speeches, generate cases with sources, and engage in a full PF-style practice round against an AI with speech recognition, which flows and responds to your speeches.
Often, students attend a tournament unprepared, having not even done a single live practice round. WithPublicForumAI’s full practice round feature, students can now deliver speeches on the upcoming topic and see exactly how the AI responds, accompanied by a helpful visual flow. Users can gain free experience debating a topic and gain insights into possible evidence or arguments that may be presented against them, all through live practice that can be done anywhere, even without a partner. Students can even adjust the AI’s skill level to match their own.
To debate the AI, students just have to follow the highlighted buttons, which guide them through the structure of a real PF round: starting with the constructive, then rebuttal, summary, and so on. Students physically speak their speech into the device, which is then flowed and input into the AI for its speech. After the AI generates, they can have it “speak” in a realistic human voice.
Perhaps the most important part of a debate round is the feedback that follows. Having constructive feedback is crucial to improving for the future and getting better at debate, precisely PublicForumAI’s mission for users. Leveraging AI, users get personalized and detailed feedback after every round, from both tech and lay judge perspectives. For fun, the feedback includes a winner, which shouldn’t be taken too seriously as the “real” result of the round or representative of the user’s skills—remember, the AI is the one judging the round, and AI in general is not perfect.
PublicForumAI also offers features specifically for flowing and case writing. For the AI casewriter, just input the topic, pick your side, and indicate how many contentions you would like. Our algorithm for generating sources is not perfect, so sources should be screened to make sure they support the evidence. We also don’t offer cut cards yet. The main goal of AI casewriter is to show the user how a PF case could be written, and provide them with evidence and contentions to use in an actual round—instead of purely copy and paste.
For the full practice round feature, the AI won’t generate sources for rebuttal and summary to prevent usage in tournaments. The speeches still provide the same educational value in terms of practice, but are simply less practical to use in a real round, which would be considered cheating and does not align with our vision.
PublicForumAI is constantly improving, and we know there are a lot of places for improvement but we are hopeful this tool provides a free way to improve students’ debate skills, no matter their income or experience.
Link: publicforumai.com
The Opinions Expressed In This Blog Post Are Solely Those of the Author And Not Necessarily Those Of DebateDrills
