Employers increasingly expect graduates to communicate clearly, negotiate effectively and handle challenging conversations with confidence. However, giving every student enough opportunity to practise these skills can be difficult.
AI role-plays help extend these opportunities. Students can work through the same scenario, repeat it as often as they need and review what happened afterwards.
SimChat is an AI simulation platform that helps organisations create, deliver and manage role-play scenarios for communication and soft skills training.
Create a free SimChat account to explore how AI role-plays could support your teaching.
What are AI role-plays in SimChat?
An AI role-play is an AI-driven character that takes the role of a client, customer, employer, colleague or another counterpart in a practice conversation. Depending on the scenario, learners can interact through:
- Text-based chat
- Natural voice conversations
- Video avatars that speak and display facial expressions
Why use AI role-plays for soft skills training?
AI role-plays are not a replacement for in-person teaching or facilitated simulation. Instead, they give students more opportunities to practise between taught sessions, placements and assessments.
Benefits include:
- Repeatable, on-demand conversation practice
- Solo deliberate practice between taught sessions
- A safe space to try different approaches
- Multiple attempts with feedback and reflection
- A transcript of each interaction for review
This gives students more time to refine their approach before entering placements, assessment centres, graduate interviews or professional conversations.
Using AI role-plays in practice
Career services and employability teams can use SimChat for mock interviews, assessment centre preparation, networking introductions, elevator pitches and presentation practice.
Business, management and professional skills courses can use SimChat for negotiation exercises, sales practice, objection handling, customer escalations, procurement conversations, performance reviews and difficult feedback discussions.
Learners speak or type in their own words, with feedback linked to what they actually said during the conversation.
Build AI role-plays from your existing materials
One of the biggest barriers to soft skills simulation is the time required to design realistic scenarios from scratch. SimChat helps you build from materials you already have, such as lesson plans, employer briefs, case studies, competency frameworks, assessment rubrics or existing role-play scripts.
Paste or import your content, add the character’s background and define the learning objectives. SimChat then generates an AI role-play that follows your resources.
Deliver soft skills training consistently across your institution
Once a scenario is created, SimChat helps you deliver it consistently across courses, schools and faculties.
Educators can:
- Store AI role-plays in a tagged central library aligned to modules, themes or learning outcomes
- Choose whether learners interact via text, voice or video for each scenario
- Set permissions so that only specific cohorts or groups can access each role-play
- Share links with students or embed access within your existing VLE
SimChat runs in a standard browser, so there is no specialist hardware to buy, no headsets to manage and no software installation required. Students can practise on the device they already use, whether they are on campus, at home or on placement.
Sign up for a free SimChat account and request a demo to see how SimChat can support communication and soft skills training across your institution.