In this paper we present HearSay, a system for browsing hypertext Web documents via audio. The HearSay system is based on our novel approach to automatically creating audio browsable content from hypertext Web documents. It combines two key technologies: (1) automatic partitioning of Web documents through tightly coupled structural and semantic analysis, which transforms raw HTML documents into semantic structures so as to facilitate audio browsing; and (2) VoiceXML, an already standardized technology which we adopt to represent voice dialogs automatically created from the XML output of partitioning. This paper describes the software components of HearSay and presents an initial system evaluation. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.11 [Software Engineering]: Software Architectures; H.4.3 [Information Systems Applications]: Communications Applications--information browsers General Terms Algorithms, Design, Experimentation Keywords World Wide Web, HTML, VoiceXML, structural analysis...
I. V. Ramakrishnan, Amanda Stent, Guizhen Yang