No abstract

Audio recordings are usually treated as one unbreakable and sequential document. Most interfaces only support basic audio navigation controls such as play, pause, forward, and rewind. However, by extracting meaningful information from audio, such as the spoken words and acoustic noise, we have created a Treemap-based interface which makes the task of finding the important information in audio simple. When applied to lecture audio, our interface allows students to easily consume lecture recordings by only listening to the parts they are interested in. A user study shows that our interface can successfully help users to find content in lecture recordings.

No abstract

<p>Audio is a ubiquitous form of information that is usually treated as a single, unbreakable, piece of content. Thus, audio interfaces remain simple, usually consisting of play, pause, forward, and rewind controls. Spoken audio can contain useful information across multiple topics and finding the information desired is usually time consuming. Most audio players simply do not reveal the content of the audio. By using the speech transcript and acoustic qualities of the audio, I have developed a tool, SpEx, which enabled search and navigation within spoken audio. SpEx displayed audio as discrete segments and revealed the topic content of each segment using mature Information Visualisation techniques. Audio segments were produced based on the acoustic and sentence properties of speech to identify topically and aurally distinct regions. A user study found that SpEx allowed users to find information in spoken audio quickly and reliably. By making spoken audio more accessible, people can gain access to a wider range of information.</p>

<p>Audio is a ubiquitous form of information that is usually treated as a single, unbreakable, piece of content. Thus, audio interfaces remain simple, usually consisting of play, pause, forward, and rewind controls. Spoken audio can contain useful information across multiple topics and finding the information desired is usually time consuming. Most audio players simply do not reveal the content of the audio. By using the speech transcript and acoustic qualities of the audio, I have developed a tool, SpEx, which enabled search and navigation within spoken audio. SpEx displayed audio as discrete segments and revealed the topic content of each segment using mature Information Visualisation techniques. Audio segments were produced based on the acoustic and sentence properties of speech to identify topically and aurally distinct regions. A user study found that SpEx allowed users to find information in spoken audio quickly and reliably. By making spoken audio more accessible, people can gain access to a wider range of information.</p>