The author presents research in the new and exciting field of speech processing. The paper is intended for researchers and students in human-computer interaction. Speech processing is important because speech is richer and faster than writing. Just as there are methods for reading faster, the author discusses techniques to speed up listening.

His system, called Speechskimmer, enables listeners to extract the meaningful chunks of speech from a recording. It also offers ways to explore segments of a speech recording in depth, by playing back or searching through a record.

One section of the paper describes speech processing techniques. The next section presents the prototype of the proposed system. A touchpad enables users to send commands such as play forward, play backward, rewind, skim (the key idea of this method), jump, and pause.

In another section, the process and results of usability testing as a measure of the quality of the user interface are presented. The results of the usability testing led to a redesigned system, which is presented in the following section. The paper ends with projections of related work and future developments, along with many references.

I appreciate the author’s interesting approach and full presentation. I especially like that he shows the process of creation followed by iteration in the system design. The topic is rather difficult, however, and more illustrations would have made the presentation even better.