Oral communication is transient but many important decisions, social contracts and fact 'ndings are 'rst canied out in an oral setup, documented in written form and later retrieved. At Carnegie Mellons University s Interactive Systems Laboratories we have been experimenting with the documentation of meetings. T h s paper summarizes part of the progress that we have made in this test bed, speci'cally on the question of automatic transcription using LVCSR, information access using non-keyword based methods, summarization and user interfaces. The system is capable to automatically construct a searchable and browsable audiovisual database of meetings and provide access to these records.

As computational and communications systems become increasingly smaller, faster, more powerful, and more integrated, the goal of interactive, integrated meeting support rooms is slowly becoming reality. It is already possible, for instance, to rapidly locate task-related information during a meeting, filter it, and share it with remote users. Unfortunately, the technologies that provide such capabilities are as obstructive as they are useful -they force humans to focus on the tool rather than the task. Thus the veneer of utility often hides the true costs of use, which are longer, less focused human interactions. To address this issue, we present our current research efforts towards SMaRT: the Smart Meeting Room Task. The goal of SMaRT is to provide meeting support services that do not require explicit human-computer interaction. Instead, by monitoring the activities in the meeting room using both video and audio analysis, the room will be able to react appropriately to users' needs and allow the users to focus on their own goals.

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We describe our system which facilitates collaboration using multiple modalities, including speech, handwriting, gestures, gaze tracking, direct