User driven audio content navigation for spoken web

It is a common practice for us to skim textual content on a web page. While skimming, we usually skip words or phrases that are not of interest to us and we slow down our speed when the content seems to be of relevance to us. But when we listen to audio content, which is not persistent and is sequential, such skimming is not possible. In developing countries, cell-phone penetration is much higher than Internet penetration. Moreover, due to low literacy, voice is a convenient modality to access information. The skimming techniques are therefore more critical in the audio domain. In this paper, we describe the technique for navigating audio content while interacting with information systems in a client server environment, where a dumb phone is the client device. The paper presents techniques for skimming audio content and for placing markers in audio. The user studies conducted with 18 users for more than 1 month, in a live setting substantiates the usability and usefulness of the navigation techniques. © 2010 ACM.