Wellspoken vs Poised: Which Communication Coach Is Right for You?

These two tools represent fundamentally different philosophies about communication improvement. Poised gives you awareness during a meeting: it counts your fillers, flags your pacing, and nudges you in real time. Wellspoken builds the skills that make you articulate in any moment, structured thinking, concise expression, pronunciation precision, and confident delivery, trained through curriculum, drills, and deep analytics across 6 categories and 12 sub-metrics on a 1000-point scale.

One is a meeting companion. The other is a training system that sharpens how you think and speak across every conversation. The question is which kind of improvement you're after.

TL;DR: Poised runs as an invisible overlay on Zoom, Teams, and Meet calls, showing live filler counts, pacing, and energy with post-call summaries. Wellspoken is a communication training app on iOS, Android, and Desktop with a 10-unit curriculum, dozens of practice drills, AI voice conversations, meeting recording with speaker isolation, and scoring across six dimensions. Choose Poised for real-time meeting awareness. Choose Wellspoken for structured skill development that sharpens how you communicate in team standups, one-on-ones, spontaneous hallway conversations, and every unscripted moment in between.

What Wellspoken Focuses On

Wellspoken treats communication as a trainable skill set with multiple dimensions. The goal is to help you become generally wellspoken: someone who can think fast on the spot, articulate anything in their head clearly, and hold their own in any conversation, whether it is planned or completely unscripted.

Comprehensive Analysis

The Wellspoken Index evaluates your speech across six categories containing 12 sub-metrics, scored on a 1000-point scale. Structure alone contains five sub-metrics: Logical Sequence, Transitions, Signposting, Opening Quality, and Closing Quality. Confidence tracks Hedging Frequency, Uptalk, and Assertiveness. Conciseness breaks into Word Choice and Word Economy. Pronunciation goes to the phoneme level. Filler Rate measures Filler Frequency. Pace measures Pause Timing and Words per Minute. Three of those categories, structure, conciseness, and phoneme-level pronunciation, capture dimensions of communication that live meeting overlays cannot assess.

Curriculum and Drills

A 10-unit curriculum takes you from foundational verbal delivery through logic, persuasion, storytelling, and navigating difficult conversations. Each unit builds on the last. Alongside the curriculum, dozens of drills isolate specific skills: timed explanation under shrinking windows, switching between persuasion modes, pivoting from tough questions to key messages, replacing passive constructions with active ones, targeted filler reduction, and articulation exercises. The library keeps growing.

Meeting Recording with Speaker Isolation

This is where Wellspoken and Poised overlap most directly, and where the difference in philosophy is clearest. Wellspoken records your real work calls, separates your voice from other speakers, and runs the full Wellspoken Index analysis on your contributions. You get scored across all six categories for an actual professional conversation, and that data feeds into your long-term progress tracking. It is proof that the skills you train in practice are transferring into the real moments that shape your reputation.

AI Voice Conversations and Lexicon

Real-time AI voice interactions let you practice with a coach, workshop ideas with a thought partner, run mock interviews, or step into 19 role-play scenarios. A Personal Lexicon system tracks vocabulary usage and phrase mastery across all your practice sessions.

What Poised Focuses On

Poised launched as a desktop companion for video calls and quickly earned a loyal following for one feature in particular: filler word tracking. Users reported up to 92% reduction in filler word usage after seeing their counts live during calls. That immediate feedback loop is powerful.

Here's what Poised offers:

• Real-time meeting overlay. A small, private window shows your filler count, pacing, energy, and confidence metrics while you're on a call. Only you can see it.
• Works with 800+ tools. Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Webex, and hundreds more.
• No bot joins your call. Poised runs locally and is invisible to other participants.
• Meeting summaries and action items. After the call, you get a recap of what was discussed.
• Live speaker notes. Poised can display your agenda items and auto-check them as you cover each topic.

For someone who needs a quick confidence boost during meetings, Poised delivers. The filler word counter alone has been called a "killer feature" by users, and the invisible-to-others design removes the social friction of having an AI tool on your call.

Worth noting: Poised was acquired by Deepgram in June 2024. Since then, the team has shifted focus toward "Shortcut by Poised," a voice-to-text productivity tool. The original coaching product still works, but future development is uncertain.

Feature Comparison

The Depth Gap

Poised surfaces metrics. Wellspoken trains the skills behind them.

Take filler words. Poised tells you that you said "um" 14 times in your last standup. Wellspoken identifies the root cause, typically a gap in how you organize ideas before speaking, then provides drills that build the cognitive habit of structuring your thoughts first. It also tracks your filler usage longitudinally and breaks fillers down by type so you can target the ones that recur most.

The same pattern holds for pace, confidence, and energy. Poised flags the symptom in real time. Wellspoken's curriculum teaches the underlying mechanics, the drills give you repetitions, and your meeting recordings show whether the training is translating to real conversations. That translation is the whole point: you practice in a controlled environment so you perform better in the spontaneous, unscripted moments that actually define how colleagues perceive you.

Poised monitors delivery during video calls and provides post-call summaries. Wellspoken measures six categories containing 12 sub-metrics and pairs that analysis with targeted practice to close the gaps.

Where Poised Wins

Poised has one clear advantage: live, in-call feedback. If you want a nudge while you're mid-sentence on a Zoom call, Poised does that and Wellspoken does not. For many people, that real-time awareness is the initial spark that motivates deeper improvement.

Poised also runs on desktop with zero friction. It integrates with 800+ call tools, is invisible to other participants, and requires no changes to your workflow.

Where Wellspoken Wins

Structured thinking and content quality. Wellspoken's curriculum covers logic, persuasion, storytelling, and strategic communication. These determine whether your ideas land, in a team brainstorm, a client call, or a casual conversation with your manager. Poised does not train content or structure.

Deliberate, targeted practice. Dozens of drills let you isolate a single skill, filler reduction, conciseness, pivoting under pressure, and train it with scored feedback in a controlled environment. That controlled repetition is what makes you sharper when the stakes are real and there is no script.

Meeting analysis depth. Both tools touch meetings, but Wellspoken isolates your voice, scores you across six dimensions, and feeds those results into your long-term growth data. Your professional conversations become the proving ground for skills you have been building in practice.

Mobile access. Wellspoken runs on iOS, Android, and Desktop. You can run a 60-second drill on your commute or rehearse a difficult conversation while walking the dog. Poised is desktop-only.

Active development. Wellspoken ships regular feature updates. Poised's roadmap has been uncertain since the Deepgram acquisition.

Who Should Use Which?

Choose Poised if:

• You primarily want live, in-call filler word awareness
• Your improvement goals are focused on delivery polish (pace, energy, eye contact)
• You work exclusively on desktop and want a passive tool that runs in the background
• You want meeting summaries and action items as a productivity feature

Choose Wellspoken if:

• You want to become the person who always sounds clear, composed, and articulate, whether the moment is planned or completely off-the-cuff
• You want structured learning with curriculum, drills, and progressive skill-building
• You care about how clearly you think and organize ideas, in addition to how you sound
• You want deep analytics across six dimensions, with long-term progress tracking
• You value daily practice as a habit, with gamification to keep you consistent
• You want AI voice conversations for coaching, scenario practice, and spontaneous thinking drills

Consider using both if:

• You want Wellspoken's depth for skill-building and Poised's live overlay for meeting-day awareness

The Bottom Line

Poised is a useful meeting companion that creates real-time awareness of delivery habits. For someone who has never seen their filler count or pacing data, that first moment of visibility can be genuinely transformative.

Wellspoken is the training that happens before, after, and between those moments. It builds the foundational skills, clear structure, confident delivery, precise pronunciation, concise expression, that reduce the very problems Poised flags. Six categories, 12 sub-metrics, dozens of drills, a 10-unit curriculum, and meeting recording with speaker isolation make it a complete development system.

If your goal is awareness during calls, Poised delivers. If your goal is to become someone who thinks clearly and speaks with ease in every room they walk into, from a Monday standup to a surprise question from leadership, Wellspoken trains the skills that compound into that reputation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Wellspoken better than Poised for reducing filler words?

Both Wellspoken and Poised track filler words, but they work differently. Poised shows a live filler count during video calls. Wellspoken analyzes filler rate as one of 12 sub-metrics, diagnoses root causes like weak structure, and provides targeted drills such as Filler Eliminator to build lasting habits.

Does Wellspoken work on Android and Desktop?

Yes. Wellspoken is available on iOS, Android, and Desktop. Poised runs on macOS, Windows, and as a Chrome extension. Wellspoken focuses on practice and training across platforms; Poised focuses on live meeting overlays on desktop.

Can Wellspoken record and analyze real meetings like Poised?

Yes. Wellspoken records real meetings, isolates your voice with multi-speaker separation, and scores your speech across 6 categories on a 1000-point scale. Poised provides live overlay metrics during calls and post-meeting summaries, but does not offer the same depth of post-meeting analysis.

Is Poised still being actively developed?

Poised was acquired by Deepgram in June 2024. The team has shifted focus toward Shortcut by Poised, a voice-to-text productivity tool. The original coaching product still works, but future development is uncertain. Wellspoken is actively developed with regular feature updates.

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