SCANMail: a voicemail interface that makes speech browsable, readable and searchable

Increasing amounts of public, corporate, and private speech data are now available on-line. These are limited in their usefulness, however, by the lack of tools to permit their browsing and search. The goal of our research is to provide tools to overcome the inherent difficulties of speech access, by supporting visual scanning, search, and information extraction. We describe a novel principle for the design of UIs to speech data: What You See Is Almost What You Hear (WYSIAWYH). In WYSIAWYH, automatic speech recognition (ASR) generates a transcript of the speech data. The transcript is then used as a visual analogue to that underlying data. A graphical user interface allows users to visually scan, read, annotate and search these transcripts. Users can also use the transcript to access and play specific regions of the underlying message. We first summarize previous studies of voicemail usage that motivated the WYSIAWYH principle, and describe a voicemail UI, SCANMail, that embodies WYSI...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Steve Whittaker, Julia Hirschberg, Brian Amento, Litza A. Stark, Michiel Bacchiani, Philip L. Isenhour, Larry Stead, Gary Zamchick, Aaron Rosenberg
• Keywords: CHI 2002, Core Voicemail Tasks, Human Computer Interaction, Private Speech Data, Speech Data