Souffleur helps resume mobile voice chats with glanceable phrases
Souffleur: A Glanceable Display for Mobile Voice Conversations
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Mobile devices let people talk by voice, but when switching back to a conversation, reading the last messages doesn’t always show the most important parts. The authors made Souffleur, a display that shows just a few short phrases to help users quickly understand and continue the conversation. They tested it with 48 people to see if it helped more than a regular chat transcript. The study found that Souffleur didn’t make it easier or harder to follow or remember the talk, but it showed much less text at a glance.
What this means in practice
- •For mobile app developers: Create glanceable voice chat summaries that aid users in resuming conversations after interruptions on smartphones.
- •For call center software teams: Implement brief phrase displays to help agents quickly catch up on ongoing voice calls after switching contexts.
Authors
Anton Wolter, William Benjamin, Niklas Elmqvist
Abstract
The speech capabilities of mobile devices have grown, but their displays still rely on a text-based chat. When resuming a voice chat after a context switch, the last messages may not convey the key points of the conversation. Autobiographical use and sessions with external participants led to design goals for a mobile-first, speech-driven, glanceable display that helps users continue their reasoning from where they left off. We implement these goals in Souffleur and evaluate it in a between-subjects study with 48 participants. Compared with a conventional chat transcript, we found no reliable difference in how easily participants followed and resumed short voice conversations, nor in effort, attention or recall, although Souffleur reduces the conversation to a few short phrases.