NewsComm: a hand-held interface for interactive access to structured audio

Abstract

The NewsComm system delivers personalized news and other program material as audio to mobile users through a hand-held playback device. This paper focuses on the iterative design and user testing of the hand-held interface. The interface was first designed and tested in a software-only environment and then ported to a custom hardware platform. The hand-held device enables navigation through audio recordings based on structural information which is extracted from the audio using digital signal processing techniques. The interface design addresses the problems of designing a hand-held and primarily non-visual interface for accessing large amounts of structured audio recordings.