If your organization has ever needed to help employees practice difficult conversations, such as sales objections, performance coaching, or de-escalation scenarios, you know how hard it is to create a realistic, low-stakes environment to practice those situations. That's exactly the problem Rehearsal Roleplay was built to solve. In a recent webinar, we took a close look at the tool from both the learner and admin side, including a live build of a brand-new roleplay environment.
What Is Rehearsal, and What Does Roleplay Add?
Rehearsal is ELB Learning's video coaching and practice platform. Its core experience has always been asynchronous: a learner responds to a video prompt, and either an AI or a human mentor reviews the response, gives feedback, and sends it back. It's an effective way to practice crucial communication skills, but it's a back-and-forth process that happens over time.
Roleplay changes that dynamic. Instead of an asynchronous exchange, the learner is now in a live, turn-based conversation with an AI avatar. You and an AI avatar go back and forth as you would in a real conversation. It's a much faster, more immersive way to practice, and it opens the door to a much wider range of scenarios.
The Learner Experience
Before starting a session, learners are presented with context, including a description of the situation they're walking into and the goals they're being evaluated against. Once the session begins, they're in a live practice space where they can see their session goals and a running transcript of the conversation alongside real-time feedback.
That feedback is one of the standout features. Rather than waiting until the end to find out how they did, learners receive guidance after each exchange so they can make adjustments on the fly if needed. At the session wrap-up, the AI evaluates the session and provides context on the learner's performance relative to the session goals and other performance criteria. The platform provides specific contextual feedback to the learner to back up its assessment.
Learners can also track their progress over time. A personal history view shows goal achievement across multiple attempts of the same scenario, making it easy to spot patterns and identify areas that need more focus.
The Manager View
From the manager dashboard, administrators can look at performance data by roleplay environment or by individual learner. Metrics include total sessions completed, average goal achievement scores, and individual goal breakdowns. For managers, this creates real visibility into where coaching conversations are breaking down and where additional support might be needed. All session details—transcripts, feedback, and timeline—are available for review.
Building a Scenario: How It Works
Creating a new roleplay environment is straightforward and doesn't require any technical expertise. The essentials are a scenario description, a set of session goals, and an AI character configuration including name, photo, voice, and language. The description does the heavy lifting: it provides context for both the learner and the AI, so the more specific you are about the situation and what good looks like, the better the experience performs.
For the AI instructions that define your avatar's tone and behavior, there's an auto-draft function that generates a starting point based on your description and goals. Most of the time, it gets you close, with only minor tweaks needed.
Once published, learners can access the scenario directly through Rehearsal, using a shareable link, or through your LMS as a SCORM package with a configurable passing threshold.
A Few Things Worth Knowing
Privacy and AI. Rehearsal processes only the transcript of what learners say—not their voice, video, or facial expressions. This was a deliberate decision to avoid biometric data processing and to keep the experience as equitable and secure as possible. It also makes the tool faster.
Upcoming: source material uploads. The ability to upload scripts, talk tracks, and other reference documents to inform the AI's evaluation is in development and will be available soon. For now, key phrases or scripted language can be included directly in the description or AI instructions.
Angry customers, difficult patients, defensive employees. The AI avatar's tone and temperament are controlled entirely by the instructions you provide. A more challenging persona—one that pushes back, gets defensive, or escalates —is absolutely achievable, and our development team is also testing updated underlying models that make scenarios significantly more demanding by default.
Getting Started
Rehearsal Roleplay is available now. If you're already a Rehearsal subscriber, reach out to your CSM or sales rep to have it enabled. If your organization is new to Rehearsal, a 30-day free trial is available. Contact us to get set up.
Check out the full webinar below, where we peeked under the hood of Rehearsal Roleplay.
