Interactive manipulation of replay speed while listening to speech recordings

Abstract

Today's interfaces for time-scaled audio replay have limitations especially regarding highly interactive tasks such as skimming and searching, which require quick temporary speed changes. Motivated by this shortcoming, we introduce a new interaction technique for speech skimming based on the so called rubberband metaphor. We propose an "elastic" audio slider which is especially useful for temporary manipulation of replay speed and which integrates seamlessly into standard interface designs. The feasibility of this concept is proven by an initial user study. Figure 1. Audio player interface with audio progress bar("Audio progress") and speed control slider ("Speed").

Supporting speech for annotation and asynchronous discussion of multimedia presentations

“…The SOLA algorithm is robust against background noise and can easily be implemented as an online algorithm whose parameters can be modified in real time. Hence, users are able to adjust the playback speed at any time and the algorithm will respond to the changes instantly (Hürst et al,. 2004).…”

“…However, it is also important that the speed can be modified spontaneously during listening, when the user would like to skim over some part of the comment or slow down below the current rate in order to listen more closely to a certain part. We have therefore also included an "elastic" audio slider (Hürst et al, 2004), as is shown in Figure 5. This UI component is integrated in the normal progress bar and offers the following additional option to skim the file: if the user holds down and drags the mouse on the bar somewhere next to the slider thumb (but not on it), the slider thumb (and hence the replayed speech) follows the mouse along a virtual "rubber band" tied between the mouse pointer and the slider thumb.…”

Interfaces for interactive audio-visual media browsing

“…Although the actual navigation in the audio file is basically a speed-based navigation (since the user does not directly change the slider's position but the speed at which it moves from one position to another), it provides more flexibility since it is integrated into a position-based interface, i.e. a regular timeline slider [2].…”

An elastic audio slider for interactive speech skimming

“…This way, users can select a basic replay speed with the speed control slider first and subsequently use elastic skimming to temporarily increase or decrease audio replay. Further details on design and technical implementation of the interface are described in [3].…”