COMPUTERIZED VOICE: More Voice Applications in Cedar.
PRESENTER: This is the second in a series of video presentations
about the etherphone voice management system at the Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center.
The etherphone system is implemented
within an integrated programming environment called Cedar.
Cedar runs on a collection of personal workstations
and servers interconnected with ethernet, a local area network.
The research goals of our experimental voice system
focus on the use of voice in personal information systems.
We will briefly review the system architecture
and the workstation telephone management
features presented in the earlier program
and then present some new voice applications, including
an audio meeting service, voice annotation of text documents,
simple voice editing, and active multimedia documents.
We will demonstrate the use of these applications
in ordinary working situations.
Our voice system supports all of the voice management needs,
including advanced telephone features for nearly
50 laboratory members.
Each office is equipped with a modified telephone instrument,
a speaker and microphone, and a custom microprocessor based
controller.
Together, this equipment is called an etherphone.
System databases and connections are
managed by a centralized switching
server on the network.
A second server, called the voice file server,
is used to store and access digitally recorded
audio signals.
A commercial speech synthesizer is
available as a server to any etherphone user.
The Cedar workstation, combined with a custom
tailored telephone system, offers
a number of flexible, timesaving conveniences
to etherphone users.
Personalized ringtunes announce calls
to individual etherphone users.
[COMPUTERIZED MELODY PLAYING]
Calls are placed by name or number.
Named calls reach etherphone users
at any location, whether in their own offices,
logged in at other workstations, or registered as visitors
at another etherphone site.
[COMPUTERIZED MUSIC]
The Cedar workstation supports a two-dimensional user interface
to the etherphone system.
This interface includes buttons to place calls, answer them,
and send selected text to a text-to-speech synthesizer.
A conversation log provides a history of recent conversations
and allows them to be manipulated.
A single mouse click and redial a prior call, as shown here,
or answer, hold, or disconnect a current call.
A personal telephone directory, created from databases
or from ordinary text files, combines private and public
telephone numbers.
The directory serves as a set of speed dialing buttons.
A click on a desired entry places a call.
The etherphone system also supports novel kinds
of interactive voice connections,
such as the use of the telephone system
to broadcast internal talks or meetings.
The audio meeting service allows one or two way connections
to meetings without interfering with the ability
to receive ordinary telephone calls.
Today's session of an ongoing user interface seminar
will start soon.
Before the meeting begins, the meeting service
is made available to remote participants.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: User interface seminar.
PRESENTER: Polle opens a reminder message,
selects the meeting name, and clicks the Join Meeting
button to join the meeting.
MEETING LEADER: And the first thing we need to do
is check the service.
Hello.
Is there anybody out there?
POLLE: Hi, this is Polle.
I'm going to stay in my office so I can get an important call.
I'll chime in if I have anything important to say.
MEETING LEADER: Oh, that's fine.
Is there anybody else out there?
DAN: Hi, this is Dan.
I'm here too.
MEETING LEADER: OK, good.
So let's get started.
Does anybody have anything to say?
In particular, I'm wondering--
MAN: The original scan.
Would you keep the scanned images?
[COMPUTERIZED MELODY]
POLLE Hi, this is Pollie.
VERNER: Hi, this is Verner Kurzman from Speech Tech.
POLLE: Oh, hi, Verner.
PRESENTER: Incoming calls automatically supersede
the meeting audio, which has been designated as a background
activity.
When Polle has completed her long awaited call,
the background meeting audio resumes.
MEETING LEADER: Oh, but that's not intentionally.
MAN: No, of course this means that the audio probably
has to be pretty high quality.
PRESENTER: The etherphone system further
supports voice annotation of text documents
or electronic mail and simple voice editing.
The voice source can be either a single speaker
or an ongoing telephone conversation.
Polle has received an electronic message
and is composing a response.
A comic strip dialog balloon indicates the presence
of a voice annotation of arbitrary length.
Voice can be added to any character in a document
without affecting the document's layout.
POLLE: Tomorrow's meeting is going
to be a Dan Sweinhart's house, 586 San Simeon,
but I don't exactly know how to get there.
[KEYBOARD CLICKING]
[TONE]
DAN: Sweinhart.
POLLE: Hi, Dan.
Leslie needs to know how to get to the meeting tomorrow.
Can I record your directions for her?
DAN: Sure.
Will she be coming from home or work?
POLLE: Home, I think.
DAN: OK, let's see.
From Mountain View, you take the Antelope Expressway one quarter
mile past Ladera into Palo Alto, and then turn right
onto San Simeon.
Then you just go two blocks, and it's on your right
past Martini's Market.
Got that?
POLLE: Yeah.
DAN: OK.
By the way Polle, can you bring a flip chart or something
for us to use tomorrow?
POLLE: Sure.
See you tomorrow.
DAN: OK, thanks.
Bye.
POLLE: Bye.
PRESENTER: In creating our voice editor,
our primary goal was ease of use in office situations.
We provide a simple interface based on text editing,
rather than a more complex approach
that might be used in a sound studio.
Our interface is optimized for adding, replacing,
or deleting a voice at the sentence or phrase level.
A visual representation of the voice
shows its sound and silence profile.
Sound is dark, and silence is light.
Special commands allow selected portions
of the voice to be played back and new voice to be added.
POLLE: Tomorrow's meeting is going
to be at Dan [? Sweinhart's ?] house, 586 San Simeon,
but I don't exactly know how to get there.
DAN: Let's see.
From Mountain View, you take the Antelope Expressway one quarter
mile past Ladera into Palo Alto, and then turn right
onto San Simeon.
Then you just go two blocks, and it's on your right
past Martini's Market.
Got that?
PRESENTER: Deleting, moving, and copying voice
use exactly the same commands as those
used in Cedar's text editor.
Color provides a short editing history
to augment the basic sound and silence profile.
The most recently modified segment
appears in bright yellow, which grows darker
with each successive edit.
POLLE: Here's Dan telling you how to get there.
PRESENTER: Textual annotations can be permanently added
to the voice profile.
These might contain additional information, as shown here,
or they might be keywords from the voice.
POLLE: Tomorrow's meeting is going
to be a Dan [? Sweinhart's ?] house, 586 San Simeon.
Here's Dan telling you how to get there.
DAN: From Mountain View, you take the Antelope Expressway
one quarter mile past Ladera into Palo Alto,
and then turn right onto San Simeon.
Then you just got two blocks, and it's on your right
past Martini's Market.
PRESENTER: Finally, she deletes the unedited version
of Dan's instructions and sends the message.
We are exploring a novel scripting mechanism
for creating arbitrary viewing paths through one
or more electronic documents.
Scripted multimedia documents can
contain a combination of text, pictures, audio, and action.
Scripts can orchestrate audiovisual presentations,
arrange informal communications, or organize
collections of information.
The description of the voice system architecture
that you saw at the beginning of this tape
was actually a segment of an automated introduction
to Cedar's voice applications.
Let's look more closely at a longer version of it.
POLLE: The Scripted Documents application
allows users to create active paths through a set
of multimedia documents.
This document presents the key ideas of scripted documents,
describes some example uses of scripts,
and explains how to create scripts and play them back.
Scripted documents rely on the etherphone system
for their narration.
This portion of the script describes the voice system
architecture by animating a diagram made with the Gargoyle
Illustrator.
Actions at each step play back previously recorded
voice segments and drive Illustrator commands
to highlight system components.
System databases and connections are managed
by a centralized switching--
a commercial speech synthesizer is
available as a server to any etherphone user.
The Finch telephone management program
can be used to place and receive calls in a variety of ways,
as well as to access the speech synthesizer.
TiogaVoice adds voice recording, playback, and editing functions
to the Tioga text editor.
A paper outlining the voice system and its design
philosophy appears in the proceedings
of the second workstation conference.
Well, I hope you enjoyed our presentation.
I have to make a call now.
[COMPUTERIZED CLASSICAL MELODY]
MAN: Hello?