FAQ

Ovida is an AI-powered platform for professional development. It has two distinct features that serve different needs:

○ Skills (Scalable, AI-Driven Development): This is Ovida's lead feature, focused on enabling you to engage in a learning process with an AI agent as your personal trainer. It allows you to get objective feedback on your performance and tracks your development over time.

○ Meeting Review (Deep, Human-Led Training): This feature allows you to share a specific meeting with a professional trainer, coach, or manager to get deep, contextual feedback on your performance.

Professional athletes are obsessive in their quest to use data - from game tape to wearable tech - to optimize every element of their preparation and performance. In a world where your ability as a business leader to connect with people drives performance, it's time to apply the same diligence to creating a competitive edge by developing your and your team’s communication skills.

As AI commoditizes many hard skills, our uniquely human ability to connect and communicate is what will set us apart as individuals and as businesses. Ovida provides the data and AI tools to measure and measurably improve these critical human skills.

Ovida is designed to provide the tools for professional development, built on a few key benefits:

○ Learning in the flow of work: Record a real meeting and get actionable feedback for your next real meeting. There's no need to step out of your productive workflow for separate classroom training.

○ A mirror for self-awareness: The AI holds up an objective mirror, helping you see yourself as others see you. This data-driven self-awareness is incredibly difficult to develop on your own and is the foundation of real growth.

○ Personalized & actionable feedback: Get objective, data-driven insights based on your actual meetings. This means no more hypothetical, hard-to-implement tips or generic training targeted at the 'median' employee.

○ Customized to your organization: Develop the specific communication skills that your organization cares about most, aligned with its unique culture and goals.

○ Focused on your development: Ovida is fundamentally a tool for your personal and professional growth. Our philosophy prioritizes the individual. Unlike workplace productivity tools, your data in Ovida is not used to measure or manage your role. You can be confident that it is dedicated solely to your development journey.

You have two simple options:

○ Record directly in Ovida (Recommended): Start your meeting in one of our custom video rooms.

○ Upload a recording: You can also upload existing video or audio files from other platforms like Zoom or Teams (enabled per request).

We strongly recommend it to ensure maximum data privacy and control.

○ Unique "Discard" feature: We understand you might be hesitant to record a meeting. Ovida allows you to grant consent beforehand, with the power to revoke it after the meeting ends. At the end of a call, either you or the other participant can select "Discard." This action is absolute and deletes the recording for everyone, permanently scrubbing it from our servers before it is ever processed.

○ Perpetual data custody: With Ovida, all meeting participants retain custody over their data in perpetuity. You will always know where your recordings are, who has access to them, and have the right to revoke consent to share.

No, both people in a conversation can benefit. Since every participant has independent control over their data, both the host and the guest can use the meeting to get feedback on their own skills. For example, in a 1:1 meeting:

○ The Manager could get feedback on skills like asking open-ended questions, active listening, and providing constructive feedback.

○ The Team Member could get feedback on skills like being open to feedback, asking clarifying questions, and clearly articulating their progress and challenges.

In Ovida, "good" feedback is measured by two things: how well it aligns with your organization's communication models, and the extent to which it is useful to you.

○ The Feedback is for You: All AI feedback is available only to you, unless you choose to share it. This process is about your development, no one else's. You are in control of the conversation with the AI and can drive the discussion to make it useful for your specific needs.

○ AI vs. Human Feedback: Research consistently shows that human feedback, even from trained experts, can be highly variable and is often affected by unconscious biases. Our AI is explicitly trained to avoid these common pitfalls, such as Confirmation Bias, Recency Bias, the Halo/Horns Effect, and Affinity Bias.

The AI has two key advantages over human feedback:

■ Consistent Objectivity: The AI delivers feedback free from the human biases listed above, as well as factors like fatigue or mood.

■ On-Demand Availability: The AI is always available, 24/7. You can solicit feedback or advice any time that suits you, not just when a human trainer is available.

○ The Best of Both Worlds: We recognize that sometimes the subtlety and connection of a real human is essential. That's why the "Human in the Loop" feature is so important. It enables you to share your experience and get input from a trusted advisor or mentor at any time.

No. You have total control over the visibility of your data. Your organization has no way of accessing your meetings or your private Skills chats with the AI without you explicitly sharing it with them first. There is no administrative override or "backdoor" access.

The organic adoption of public AI tools creates a "shadow AI" problem. Ovida solves this by providing a secure, purpose-built, enterprise-grade platform, allowing your organization to harness AI-driven guidance within a controlled, trusted, and measurable ecosystem.

You are in complete control. Nothing is shared without your explicit action.

○ To share a Meeting Review: From the specific meeting page, select "Share" and invite a trainer or colleague. They will only get access to that single meeting.

○ To share a Skill: From within a Skill track, select "Share" to invite a manager or mentor. They will see your chat history and progress for that Skill only.

Ovida is architected with privacy and data protection as a foundational principle. Our practices are validated by a SOC 2 Type 1 report, which confirms our commitment to enterprise-grade security. Key controls include:

○ Validated Security Controls: Regular vulnerability scans, penetration tests, and intrusion detection systems.

○ Data Encryption: All customer data is encrypted both at rest and in transit.

○ World-Class Infrastructure: Our platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

○ Strict Access Management: We enforce role-based access controls and the Principle of Least Privilege.

○ Formal Incident Response: We maintain a formal, documented incident response plan.

○ Data Management & Deletion: Users have the absolute right to permanently delete their data at any time.

A commitment to fairness and the active mitigation of bias is fundamental to our process. We achieve this by:

○ Focusing on Objective Behaviors: Our platform measures specific, observable communication behaviors (e.g., talk-time percentage) rather than making subjective judgments.

○ Inclusive Dataset Curation: We train our AI on intentionally diverse and representative datasets.

○ Continuous Monitoring & Human Oversight: Our "watchdog" AIs and HITL capability provide a critical safeguard against bias.

No. Our AI models are pre-trained. Customer conversations are used only to generate feedback for the user and are never used to train our models. This fundamental architectural choice eliminates the primary risks associated with public LLMs.

We use a multi-layered system of observability and management:

○ Dedicated & Constrained AI Agents: We build dedicated, single-tenant AI agents for each client.

○ Curated Knowledge Base: Our agents are restricted to referencing only the content, competency frameworks, and leadership models that your organization approves.

○ Sophisticated Oversight: We use specialized "watchdog" AIs to monitor engagements for consistency and quality, automatically flagging any issues for review by our human quality assurance team.

It is. The fourth person to join our team was our Data Compliance Officer. We take this stuff seriously. Our core business is trust. 

Coaches, counsellors, leading universities and Fortune 500 companies all use Ovida to assess and improve communication skills in sensitive environments and with confidential conversations. We comply with GDPR (the strictest data privacy regulation in the world) and are constantly striving to provide the most secure space for sensitive conversations.

Ovida is currently only available in English. Given that our team is deeply multilingual and multi-national, adding multilingual capability is something we're aiming to introduce as a top priority. It's important to us that we maintain our exceptional levels of insight as we roll our new languages, so it's a process we are undertaking deliberately and therefore a little more slowly than we'd like. If you are looking to use Ovida in a language besides English, and want to help bump your preferred language up the priority list, please drop us a message using the chat feature at the bottom right of your screen.