> And honestly the three presenters I saw didn't even seem like they rehearsed at all. They just read from the prompter and tried to put excitement in their voice at the same time and it just fell flat.
Yes. I haven't yet watched talks from this IO, but it was exactly my impression from last year's IO and Chrome Dev Summit. There are some speakers, mostly dev rels, who clearly love speaking and are great at it; but most of the speakers were just woodenly reading from the screen. As if they are unaware that written language is different from spoken language, and it takes rare skills to write a speech and then read it back to the audience in such a way that would sound natural and engaging.
Yes. I haven't yet watched talks from this IO, but it was exactly my impression from last year's IO and Chrome Dev Summit. There are some speakers, mostly dev rels, who clearly love speaking and are great at it; but most of the speakers were just woodenly reading from the screen. As if they are unaware that written language is different from spoken language, and it takes rare skills to write a speech and then read it back to the audience in such a way that would sound natural and engaging.