To Call or to Recall? That's the Research Question

Abstract

We present findings of a study with 62 subjects who had 796 of their outgoing mobile phone calls recorded and transcribed for their later annotation-by highlighting important information shared during calls. We found that patterns in these calls (numbers, names, interrogative adverbs), as well as some contextual parameters, are better indicators of annotation needs than the callers' profile or call quality. Callers highlight information in both parties' turns (caller and callee) more often than highlighting solely information provided by the callee, which is mostly due to annotating questions with contextual information for the highlights in the callee's turns. We discuss how this behavior changes according to call purpose. Finally, we found that annotation needs change over time: whereas some annotations might not be considered relevant after weeks, others originally considered irrelevant might become important archival notes. We present implications of these findings for the design of mobile phone annotation tools.

Designing prosthetic memory

“…In Note4U, the notes, audio recordings and transcripts are temporally co-indexed, enabling users to navigate between these three prosthetic memories. For example, when a user selects parts of their notes as shown in (1) in Figure 1, the corresponding part of the transcript reflecting what has been said when the selected part of the notes has been written is highlighted (2). In addition, the audio timeline cursor is moved to the start time of the highlighted transcript block (3).…”

“…For example, Highlighter enables users to highlight parts of the transcript during the meeting while in Hotspots users can click a button to indicate important audio segments during the recording phase [9]. A similar approach has been studied by Carrascal et al [2] where users can highlight important parts in phone call transcripts.…”