What you see is (almost) what you hear: design principles for user interfaces for accessing speech archives

Abstract

Despite the recent growth and potential utility of speech archives, we currently lack tools for effective archival access. Previous research on search of textual archives has assumed that the system goal should be to retrieve sets of relevant documents, leaving users to visually scan through those documents to identify relevant information. However, in previous work we show that in accessing real speech archives, it is insufficient to only retrieve “document” sets [9,10]. Users experience huge problems of local navigation in attempting to extract relevant information from within speech “documents”. These studies also show that users address these problems by taking handwritten notes. These notes detail both the content of the speech and serve as indices to help access relevant regions of the archive. From these studies we derive a new principle for the design of speech access systems: What You See Is (Almost) What You Hear. We present a new user interface to a broadcast news archive, designed on that principle.