What is Roleplay?

Overview

Roleplay is Rehearsal's AI-powered conversational practice platform. Learners have real-time, voice-based conversations with customizable AI characters to practice professional skills — from sales calls and customer service to leadership coaching and difficult conversations.

Unlike traditional video-based scenarios, Roleplay provides dynamic conversations where learners speak naturally and receive intelligent, context-aware responses. Each Session is analyzed and scored against scenario-specific Goals and a set of conversational Performance Metrics, giving learners immediate, actionable feedback.

Key Concepts

Environments

An Environment is a practice scenario. It defines the context, the learner's role, the AI character they'll speak with, and the goals they'll be evaluated on. Environments are created by admins and authors, and published to the learner catalog.

Sessions

A Session is a single practice conversation within an Environment. Learners can complete as many Sessions as they like. Each Session is scored independently against the Environment's goals.

AI Personas

Every Environment includes an AI Persona — the character the learner will speak with. The Persona has a name, personality, motivations, concerns, and behavioral responses that make the conversation realistic and challenging.

Goals

Goals are the measurable objectives visible to the learner before and during a Session. After the Session, the AI evaluates performance against each goal and provides feedback.

Performance Metrics

Performance Metrics are the conversational skills every Session is scored against, separate from scenario-specific Goals. Rehearsal ships with six defaults that admins can rename site-wide and authors can further customize per Environment to match their competency framework.

Common Use Cases

Sales discovery and objection handling
Customer service and call center training
Leadership and coaching conversations
New hire onboarding practice
Difficult conversation rehearsal
Compliance and regulatory scenarios

How Roleplay Relates to Rehearsal

Roleplay is built on the Rehearsal platform. Learners log in through Rehearsal (directly or via SSO), and admins manage Roleplay alongside other Rehearsal features. Roleplay uses OpenAI's Realtime API for conversational AI — for details on data privacy and AI usage, see Understanding AI in Roleplay.

Getting Help

This knowledge base is under active development. We're continuously adding new articles and expanding coverage as Roleplay evolves. If you don't find what you need here, contact support and we'll help you directly.