Conference Scribe: turning conference calls into documents

Telephone calls and multi-party conference calls are transmitted and controlled by computer much like electronic documents. However, the way we traditionally use conference calls is very different from the way we use documents. This is primarily due to the transient unstructured nature of audio, and the lack of tools for managing, manipulating, and displaying telephone conversations and conference calls. This work is aimed at letting people use conference calls in many of the same ways that they use documents. This paper describes a system for turning conference calls into archived documents that can be browsed, skimmed, displayed, hyperlinked and annotated on the World Wide Web. The "Conference Scribe " system has three principle components: the "SkimServer" for recording and playback, the "IDB Server" for storing and retrieving time stamped labels, and a Java applet for interactively skimming recordings. The parallels between conference calls and documents are reviewed, and form the basis for the design of the system.