Voice Annotation and Editing in a Workstation Environment

A bst ract: The Xerox Cedar experimental development environment, running on personal workstations, incorporates a structured document editor, which is used as the basis of many applications, including programming and document preparation. A project at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center has integrated the telephone into this environment, partly to afford control over a user's telephone from his workstation and partly to incorporate recording and playback of voice into the workstation capability. This paper describes incorporation of voice annotations into normal documents within this environment. The user interface is designed to be lightweight and easy to use, since spontaneity in adding vocal annotations is essential. Voice within a document is shown as a distinctive shape superimposed around a character, so that the document's visual layout and its contents as observed by other programs (e.g., compilers) are unaffected: Users pOint at text selections and use menus to add and listen to voice. Simple voice editing is available: users can select a voice annotation and open a window showing its sound profile. Sounds from the same or other voice windows can be cut and pasted together, and a lightweight "dictation facility" that uses a record/stop/backup model can be used to record and incorporate new sounds conveniently. Editing is done largely at the phrase level (never at the phoneme level), representing the granularity at which editing can be done fastest and with least effort. The voice itself can be annotated with text. This and several other features have been designed to add speed and meaning to the editing process. The dictation facility can also be used when plaCing annotations straight into documents. This paper describes the user interface in detail and explains why we believe that this unusually lightweight interface is the desired abstraction for voice in a general purpose workstation. It also discusses the supporting system capabilities provided by a distributed environment on a local area network. There has been a trend in office systems for some time toward a single computer-based system that can satisfy all of a user's working needs. Combined with a trend away from large time-shared systems and toward personal computers, there has evolved the concept of the workstation, a powerful personal computer that performs a wide range of functions. These may include text composition, document preparation and typesetting, support for program development, spreadsheets and accounting facilities, and general-purpose local computing, as well as access to remote computers. …