Interacting with SpeechSkimmer

Barry Arons,
Speech Interaction Research

E-mail: barons@mailhub.media.mit.edu

SpeechSkimmer is an interactive system for quickly browsing and finding information in speech recordings. Skimming speech recordings is much more difficult than visually scanning images, text, or video because of the slow, linear, temporal nature of the audio channel. The SpeechSkimmer system uses a combination of (1) time compression and pause removal, (2) automatically finding segments that summarize a recording, and (3) interaction techniques, to enable a speech recording to be heard quickly and at several levels of detail.

SpeechSkimmer was first presented at UIST '93. Since that time several important features have been added. Most notable is the use of a pitch-based emphasis detection algorithm to automatically find topic introductions and summarizing statements from a recording. This demonstration is presented as a hands-on guide, allowing one to explore the SpeechSkimmer user interface.

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