Markup as you talk: establishing effective memory cues while still contributing to a meeting

Meeting participants can experience cognitive overload when they need both to verbally contribute to ongoing discussion while simultaneously creating notes to promote later recall of decisions made during the meeting. We designed two novel cuing tools to reduce the cognitive load associated with note-taking, thus improving verbal contributions in meetings. The tools combine real-time automatic speech recognition (ASR) with lightweight annotation to transform note-taking into a low overhead markup process. To create lightweight notes, users do not generate the notes’ content themselves. Instead they simply highlight important phrases in a real-time ASR transcript (Highlighter tool), or press a button to indicate when they heard something important (Hotspots tool). We evaluated these markup tools against a traditional pen-and-paper baseline with 26 users. Hotspots was highly successful: compared with handwritten notes, it increased participants’ conversational contributions and redu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: CSCW
• Authors: Steve Whittaker, Vaiva Kalnikaité, Patrick Ehlen
• Keywords: Automatic Speech Recognition, Cognitive Overload, CSCW 2012, Markup Tools, Social Sciences