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 WYSIAWYH. We report on a laboratory experiment and a two-month field trial evaluation. SCANMail outperformed a state of the art voicemail system on core voicemail tasks. This was attributable to SCANMail's support for visual scanning, search and information extraction. While the ASR transcripts contain errors, they nevertheless improve the efficiency of voicemail processing. Transcripts either provide enough information for users to extract key points or to navigate to important regions of the underlying speech, which they can then play directly.
This paper describes SCANMail, a system that allows users to browse and search their voicemail messages by content through a GUI. Content based navigation is realized by use of automatic speech recognition, information retrieval, information extraction and human computer interaction technology. In addition to the browsing and querying functionalities, acoustics-based caller ID technology is used to proposes caller names from existing caller acoustic models trained from user feedback. The GUI browser also provides a note-taking capability. Comparing SCANMail to a regular voicemail interface in a user study, SCANMail performed better both in terms of objective (time to and quality of solutions) as well as subjective objectives.
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