Listening to a speech recording is much more difficult than
visually scanning a document because of the transient and temporal
nature of audio. Audio recordings capture the richness of speech,
yet it is difficult to directly browse the stored information.
This work investigates techniques for structuring, filtering,
and presenting recorded speech, allowing a user to navigate and
interactively find information in the audio domain. This research
makes it easier and more efficient to listen to recorded speech
by using the SpeechSkimmer system.
This talk will briefly review Hyperspeech, a speech-only hypermedia
system that explores issues of speech user interfaces, browsing,
and the use of speech as data in an environment without a visual
display. The system uses speech recognition input and synthetic
speech feedback to aid in navigating through a database of digitally
recorded speech. This system illustrates that managing and moving
in time are crucial in speech interfaces. Hyperspeech uses manually
segmented and structured speech recordings-a technique that is
practical only in limited domains.
This talk will focus on SpeechSkimmer, a user interface for
interactively skimming speech recordings. SpeechSkimmer uses
simple speech processing techniques to overcome the limitations
of Hyperspeech while allowing a user to hear recorded sounds
quickly, and at several levels of detail. This work exploits
properties of spontaneous speech to automatically select and
present salient audio segments in a time-efficient manner. User
interaction, through a manual input device, provides continuous
real-time control of the speed and detail level of the audio
presentation. SpeechSkimmer incorporates time-compressed speech,
pause removal, automatic emphasis detection, and non-speech audio
feedback to reduce the time needed to listen. This research presents
a multi-level structural approach to auditory skimming, and user
interface techniques for interacting with recorded speech.