Explicative Document Reading Controlled by Non-speech Audio Gestures

摘要

There are many situations in which listening to a text produced by a text-to-speech system is easier or safer than reading, for example when driving a car. Technical documents, such as conference articles, manuals etc., usually are comprised of relatively plain and unequivocal sentences. These documents usually contain words and terms unknown to the listener because they are full of domain specific terminology. In this paper, we propose a system that allows the users to interrupt the reading upon hearing an unknown or confusing term by a non-speech acoustic gesture (e.g. "uhm?"). Upon this interruption, the system provides a definition of the term, retrieved from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. The selection of the non-speech gestures has been made with a respect to the cross-cultural applicability and language independence. In this paper we present a set of novel tools enabling this kind of interaction.