LiveSnippets: Voice-based live authoring of multimedia articles about experiences

Abstract

We transform traditional experience writing into in-situ voice-based multimedia authoring. Documenting experiences digitally in blogs and journals is a common activity that allows people to socially connect with others by sharing their experiences (e.g. travelogue). However, documenting such experiences can be time-consuming and cognitively demanding as it is typically done OUT-OF-CONTEXT (after the actual experience). We propose in-situ voice-based multimedia authoring (IVA), an alternative workflow to allow IN-CONTEXT experience documentation. Unlike the traditional approach, IVA encourages in-context content creations using voice-based multimedia input and stores them in multi-modal "snippets". The snippets can be rearranged to form multimedia articles and can be published with light copy-editing. To improve the output quality from impromptu speech, Q&A scaffolding was introduced to guide the content creation. We implement the IVA workflow in an android application, LiveSnippets - and qualitatively evaluate it under three scenarios (travel writing, recipe creation, product review). Results demonstrated that IVA can effectively lower the barrier of writing with acceptable trade-offs in multitasking.