Forward and Backward Speech Skimming with the Elastic Audio Slider

In pursuit of the goal to make recorded speech as easy to skim as printed text, a variety of methods and user interfaces have been suggested in the literature, involving time-compressed audio, speech segmentation and recognition, etc. We propose a new user interface, the elastic audio slider, which makes navigation in speech documents similar to video navigation or text scrolling. The approach supports navigation at variable speed in both forward and backward direction while providing immediate intelligible audio feedback during the user’s interactions. A user study was conducted to prove the usefulness of backward replay of speech for tasks such as topic classification. In addition, we show that the proposed interface offers the opportunity to combine the advantages of existing approaches within a single, easy-to-use UI component that complements and enhances the common user interfaces known from standard audio player software.