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Oomou is a Hong Kong-based startup focused on helping people improve the workplace social skills that shape career growth, confidence and long-term success.

Oomou is designed for leaders, workers, graduates and anyone who wants to strengthen their interpersonal techniques and become more effective at work.

Oomou believes that communication, collaboration, confidence and relationship-building are essential to career progression and to creating a productive workplace.

The simple facts and figures you need to know:
- Cost of Failure: 89% of employers say a failed hire is often due to a lack of soft skills, which can cost companies up to $17,000 per bad hire.
- Poor communication alone causes average losses of $62.4 million yearly for large companies, while 64%–89% of new hire failures are due to lacking these skills.
- A study by MIT found that soft skills training delivered a 250% return on investment within eight months of its conclusion.
- Research associated with Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation, and Stanford Research Centre found that 85% of long-term job success comes from well-developed soft and people skills, with only 15% coming from technical knowledge.

Our Social Skills Simulator uses AI-assisted agents to assess your social skills, helping you improve them in the workplace over a relatively short period. These agents pinpoint your weaknesses and guide you through the process of improving them.

Research shows that long-term success in the workplace comes hand-in-hand with well-developed interpersonal skills. Put simply: if you can’t work well with others, you’re far less likely to grow, develop, be trusted and succeed. The Social Skills Simulator assesses your interpersonal skills, gives you a report on what you do well and where you can improve — and then takes you through that improvement process so you can indeed grow confidence and become more effective in the workplace.

There is a well-documented and persistent gap between how people get assessed and what actually determines whether they succeed. Existing tools cannot adequately observe how someone communicates under real conditions. But the Social Skills Simulator is set up to use AI and the latest tech to assess your social skills because when you learn where you can improve, you’ll be able to start a journey towards better confidence and interpersonal techniques that grow you as both worker and human.

Unlike traditional interviews, the Social Skills Simulator is designed to reduce the advantage of rehearsed answers and instead observe how someone actually communicates in real time. Don’t think of it as an interview. Think of it as an AI-driven, real time assessment of your interpersonal skills.

Oscar Venhuis and Matt Fleming set Oomou up to help pass on their knowledge and training to people who wanted to upskill in their jobs via marketing, tech, AI and self-improvement courses. However, they then met Marty Miller, so the question should be…

Marty Miller is an academic researcher whose published work sits at the intersection of interaction design, immersive technology and artificial intelligence. He asks: ‘how do you surface and measure the intangible qualities of human experience in a structured way, without flattening or losing what makes those qualities meaningful?’ He also asks: ‘If intangible qualities can be made observable through careful interaction design — and if AI agents can be structured to look for specific behavioural signals — what would a system look like that used those principles to assess interpersonal soft skills at scale?’ The Social Skills Simulator is Marty’s answer to that question and he has been prototyping the model over the past few years.

In short, HEXACO. This is a six-factor model of personality structure created by psychologists circa 2007. It focuses on Emotionality, Extraversion (self-confidence), Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience — but crucially it also introduces Honesty and Humility into the mix. This covers a person’s sincerity, fairness and resistance to exploitative behaviour. Oomou believes this is a key area in the development of interpersonal skills, hence the Social Skills Simulator also assesses honesty and humility in subjects too.

Three AI agents run simultaneously during every Social Skills Simulator assessment session. Each agent focuses on a distinct set of observable behaviours and they work independently so that the perspective of one does not distort the scoring of another.

Agent A is the Behavioral Analyst, Agent B is the Emotional Calibrator and Agent C is the Consistency Probesmith. Having independent agents assess the same conversation produces more reliable and defensible scores than any single perspective could generate alone. When agents agree, the signal is strong. When they diverge, something worth examining is present. And so Oomou reports what these agents find and creates a ‘score’ to help you understand where you can improve.

The Social Skills Simulator uses a rotating bank of question prompts across sessions. If the system is genuinely measuring the person rather than their familiarity with a particular topic, scores should remain broadly consistent regardless of which question is asked. If scores shift primarily with the question rather than the person, the system is measuring topic knowledge rather than underlying behavioural tendencies. The rotating bank generates the cross-item reliability data that validates the framework and supports the case for Phase 2 development of the Social Skills Simulator.

Because there won’t be a full-blown simulator if we can’t test it and make sure it’s effective, efficient and, above all, useful. Please help us to test it by clicking on the ‘Test Our Demo’ button on our Home Page. Remember: this is free and we believe you’ll be surprised by the insights you glean.

Not for now. We’re in beta testing mode so we want as many people to test our prototype as possible so we can shape it as effectively as we can. All that costs is a few minutes of your time — but it’s hugely valuable to us.