MAS.632 Conversational Computer Systems - MIT OpenCourseWare

280 VOICE COMMUNICATION WITH COMPUTERS
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D: Hello, this isDebby Hindus speaking.
B: Hi Deb, it' Bob. I'm just getting out of work, Ifigured I'd call and see how late you're going to stay tonight.
D: Well, Ithink it'll take me about another hour, hour and a hall, to finish up the things I'm doing now.
B: OK, I'm just going to head on home, I'I probably do alittle shopping on the way.
D: Well ifyou think of itmaybe you could get some of that good ice cream that you got last week.
B: OK. By the way, somebody, uh...
B: mentioned an article you might be able to use
B: inyour tutorial. Debby: Oh really? [Debby's very short tumrnignored.] is
B: Yeah, it's by Grasme Hitat, inthe June'91 Computational Linguistics.
Figure 12.6. A telephone recording tool shows the recent history of a conversation.
Each box represents one turn; position differentiates speakers.
Reprinted with permission from proceedings of the ACM 1992 Conference
on Computer-SupportedCooperativeWork, @ 1992, ACM.
Another Media Lab application, Xcapture, records ambient sound in an office
into a circular buffer or "digital tape loop," which serves as a short-term auditory
memory aid. The archetypical situation for its use is a collaborative writing ses­
sion; one person suggests an alternate wording for a sentence while the other
hurries to write it down, but neither can repeat the revision word-for-word and it
is lost. Xcapture records in the background, displaying a small animated icon
with a moving bar. When the user clicks on this icon, recording stops and a
SoundViewer widget appears in a popup window (see Figure 12.7); the Sound-
Viewer allows interactive playback of approximately the last five minutes of
recording (the precise amount depends on available system memory). The user
can review this recording, scan it at a faster speed, save it to a file, or cut and
paste it into another application.