VoiceAssist: Guiding users to high-quality voice recordings

Prem Seetharaman, Gautham Mysore, Bryan Pardo, Paris Smaragdis, Celso Gomes

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Voice recording is a challenging task with many pitfalls due to sub-par recording environments, mistakes in recording setup, microphone quality, etc. Newcomers to voice recording often have difficulty recording their voice, leading to recordings with low sound quality. Many amateur recordings of poor quality have two key problems: too much reverberation (echo), and too much background noise (e.g. fans, electronics, street noise). We present VoiceAssist, a system that helps inexperienced users produce high quality recordings by providing real-time visual feedback on audio quality. We integrate modern audio quality measures into an interactive human-machine feedback loop, so that the audio quality can be maximized at capture-time. We demonstrate the utility of this feedback for improving the recording quality with a user study. When presented with visual feedback about recording quality, users produced recordings that were strongly preferred by third-party listeners, when compared to recordings made without this feedback.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCHI 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9781450359702
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2 2019
Event2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019 - Glasgow, United Kingdom
Duration: May 4 2019May 9 2019

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Conference

Conference2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityGlasgow
Period5/4/195/9/19

Keywords

  • Active capture
  • Audio quality
  • Creativity support tools
  • Feedback
  • Interfaces
  • Narration
  • Speech
  • Voice recording

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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