Jotmail: a voicemail interface that enables you to see what was said

ABSTRACT

Voicemail is a pervasive, but under-researched tool for workplace communication. Despite potential advantages of voicemail over email, current phone-based voicemail UIs are highly problematic for users. We present a novel, Web-based, voicemail interface, Jotmail. The design was based on data from several studies of voicemail tasks and user strategies. The GUI has two main elements: (a) personal annotations that serve as a visual analogue to underlying speech; (b) automatically derived message header information. We evaluated Jotmail in an 8-week field trial, where people used it as their only means for accessing voicemail. Jotmail was successful in supporting most key voicemail tasks, although users' electronic annotation and archiving behaviors were different from our initial predictions. Our results argue for the utility of a combination of annotation based indexing and automatically derived information, as a general technique for accessing speech archives.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications
          Subjects: Electronic mail

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Audio input/output
      H.5.5 Sound and Music Computing
          Subjects: Systems

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Languages, Management, Measurement, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
“speech as data”, annotation, asynchronous communication, empirical evaluation, note-taking, speech access, voicemail