Design and evaluation of the asynchronous voice meeting system AVM

A voice communication system for asynchronous meetings held in non-real time will attract a broad range of users because it is convenient and easy to use with mobile devices. To realize such a system, however, it will be necessary to make possible the natural input of the progressive process of speech at the same time as facilitating the quotation of audio information and outlining of others’ references. This study reports the design and evaluation of a new interface for effective asynchronous voice meetings, the AVM (Asynchronous Voice Meeting System), a client-server type meeting system that uses overlapping speech. Speeches were, in particular, displayed as text information on the client side for the effective visualization of comments made during these voice meetings. The proposed system AVM was compared with an electronic bulletin board system by discussing the same topic. Using the AVM, the total number of speech utterances decreased, and the total amount of letters went down to 48 % compared to the conventional electronic bulletin board system. Subjective evaluations also rated the AVM highly, indicating the usefulness of the proposed system AVM.