TED Talk & Keynote Practice — AI Speech Coach

A great keynote is not a great speaker reading a great script. It's the fortieth run of a script that survived being cut in half twice. The TED speakers and conference keynoters you remember spent 30–60 hours rehearsing for an 18-minute slot. Speakfect is the practice room that lets you put in that work without recruiting a live audience every night.

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Why a keynote is different from any other talk

A panel is a sequence of unprepared moments. A board meeting is a defense. A keynote is a prepared monologue with a stopwatch on the floor and a camera in your face. Three things make it uniquely hard:

Time discipline. TED's 18-minute cap exists because attention falls off a cliff at minute 19. Conference keynotes give you 20–45 minutes and will cut your mic if you go long. Every great keynote is rehearsed against a real timer, not a finger-count.
The opener is everything. The audience decides in the first 90 seconds whether to lean in or open Slack. Your opener is the most rehearsed 90 seconds of your career.
The pacing has to vary. Monotone keynotes — even smart ones — disappear from the room. Pace targets shift across the talk: 110–125 wpm in the story, 140–155 wpm in the argument, intentional silences at the turns.

How Speakfect's keynote prep works

Open Speakfect and pick Keynote as your session type. Default coach is The Mentor for content development, The Critic for the final 5–10 dress runs.
Set your target length (8, 12, 18, or 30 minutes) and your toughness level (1–5). Toughness 4–5 is what we recommend the week of the talk.
Stand up, set your phone on a table 6 feet away, and deliver the talk out loud, full performance. No reading. The phone is a stand-in for the camera at the back of the hall.
After you finish, Speakfect gives you:
- Time vs. target with a per-section breakdown.
- Pace heatmap so you can see where you sped up under stress.
- Filler word log with a tap-through transcript — every "um," every "you know," every "kind of."
- Confidence, clarity, and engagement scores with concrete next-rehearsal asks.
- Coach Chat — ask follow-ups like "Where did I lose energy?" or "Rewrite the closing line three different ways."

The 4-act keynote structure that fits 18 minutes

Act 1 — The hook (≈ 90 sec)

A single, specific scene that lands the topic in 90 seconds. No throat-clearing, no "I want to talk to you today about…" — just into the scene. The hook earns the rest of the talk.

Act 2 — The argument (≈ 6 min)

The case. Three points, max. Each point: claim, one piece of evidence, one example. Six minutes is exactly enough for three points told well; four points and you'll go long.

Act 3 — The story (≈ 7 min)

The personal or research narrative that demonstrates the argument. This is the heart of the talk. Slow down here — pace target 110–125 wpm. Speakfect will flag the spots you sped through.

Act 4 — The takeaway (≈ 90 sec)

The one line you want quoted on Twitter the next morning. Rehearse the closing line until you can land it without looking down. The takeaway is the one rehearsal target nobody actually drills — and it's the difference between a talk that's clapped and a talk that's shared.

A 14-day rehearsal calendar (used by Speakfect users)

Day 1–3: Outline only. Speak Act 2 (the argument) into Speakfect three times. Don't write the talk yet.
Day 4–6: Draft the script. Speak it through once a day. Cut 20% each day.
Day 7–9: Memorize the hook and the takeaway verbatim. The middle stays semi-extemporaneous.
Day 10–12: Full run-throughs at toughness 4. Watch the pace heatmap; smooth the spikes.
Day 13: Two full runs at toughness 5 with the camera framing that the venue will use. Rest your voice the rest of the day.
Day 14 (talk day): One quiet walk-through, no full delivery. Trust the reps.

Common mistakes Speakfect catches

The 22-minute "18-minute talk." You think you're at 18:00. The transcript clock says 22:30. The conference will cut you.
"So…" "So…" "So…" Fillers cluster at scene transitions. Speakfect logs every one and shows the sentence before it, so you can cut the cause, not just the symptom.
Pace runaway in Act 3. Story sections accelerate under adrenaline. Target 110–125 wpm; most first-time TEDx speakers are at 165 in dress rehearsal.
Closing line read off the floor. If you can't say the takeaway with eye contact, it doesn't get quoted.

Use the right coach for the stage

Community TEDx / internal TED-style talk: Mentor at toughness 2–3 for content, Critic at toughness 4 for the final week.
Industry conference keynote (3,000-person ballroom): Critic from day one. Toughness 5 the last 3 days.
Investor or board keynote (high-stakes, on-the-record): Critic with Skip body language turned off, since posture gets graded too.

Privacy and your script

Your draft, your transcripts, and your dress-rehearsal audio stay yours. By default Speakfect stores transcripts so you can compare today's run to yesterday's; you can switch to auto-delete after 1 day in Profile if you'd rather not keep anything around between sessions. Audio is processed by Google Gemini for transcription and scoring (and used for nothing else). See our Privacy Policy for the full breakdown.

Get started

Pick a date for your talk. Open Speakfect tonight. Run Act 2 once before bed. The 40th rehearsal starts with the first.