Interface Issues for Accessing and Skimming Speech Documents in Context with Recorded Lectures and Presentations

In this paper we discuss different ways to present, skim, and access audio files containing recorded presentations or lectures. Such acoustic signals generally have special characteristics and features that might cause problems when using common techniques for audio access. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate commonly used approaches for presentation and interaction with audio files and to identify their usability and limitations in context with recorded lectures. We discuss different alternatives for presenting audio documents, for example, as a result of an audio-based search engine, as well as methods for accessing and skimming recorded lectures and we identify which techniques are useful (and which are not) in our scenario and therefore should (or shouldn’t) be integrated in a final user interface.