Interactive Quiet Calls: Talking Silently on Mobile Phones

2012

Abstract ForcePhone is a mobile synchronous haptic communication system. During phone calls, users can squeeze the side of the device and the pressure level is mapped to vibrations on the recipient's device. The pressure/vibrotactile messages supported by ForcePhone are called pressages. Using a lab-based study and a small field study, this paper addresses the following questions: how can haptic interpersonal communication be integrated into a standard mobile device?

2008

Even though natural language voice-only input applications may be quite successful in desktop or office environments, voice may not be an appropriate input modality in some mobile situations. This necessitates the addition of a secondary input modality, ideally one with which users can express the same amount of content as they can with natural language using a similar amount of effort. The work presented here describes one possible solution to this problem - leveraging existing help mechanisms in the voice-only application to support an additional non-voice input modality, in our case text input. The user can choose the speech or text modality according to their current situation (e.g. noisy environment) and have the same interaction experience.

CHI'04 extended abstracts on Human factors in …, 2004

Human Factors and Voice Interactive Systems, 1999

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

The goal of the present study is to introduce a speaking interface of mobile devices for speech impaired people. The latest devices (including PDAs with integrated telephone, Smartphones, Tablet PCs) possess numerous favorable features: small size, portability, considerably fast processor speed, increased storage size, telephony, large display and convenient development environment. Standardized easy-to-use speech I/O is missing, however. The majority of vocally handicapped users are elderly people who are often not familiar with computers. Many of them have other disorder(s) (e.g. motor) and/or impaired vision. The paper reports the design and implementation aspects of converting standard devices into a mobile speaking aid for face-toface and telephone conversations. The device can be controlled and text is input by touch-screen and the output is generated by a text-to-speech system. The interface is configurable (screen colors and text size, speaking options, etc.) according to the users' personal preferences.

We present a framework, CALL-SLT Lite, which can be used by people with only very basic software skills to create interactive multimodal speech-enabled CALL games suitable for beginner/low intermediate child language learners. The games are deployed over the web and can be accessed through a normal browser, and the framework is completely language-independent. As the name suggests, the framework grew out of an earlier platform, CALL-SLT, which enables construction of similar games but uses a more sophisticated architecture. We review the history of the project, describing the type of game we are aiming to build and our reasons for believing that they are useful, and then present CALL-SLT Lite and an initial evaluation comparing the performance of the two versions of the framework. The results suggest that the Lite framework, although much simpler, offers performance at least as good as that of the original system.

Nowadays whenever we are talking on a cell phone in a crowd, then actually we are not talking, we are yelling because of lots of disturbance and noise around us. However, there is no need to scream to convey our message and wasting our energy anymore.For this purpose a new technology known as the " Silent Sound Technology " has been introduced that will put an end to the noise pollution. The Silent sound technology is a perfect solution for those people who have lost their voice but wish to speak on mobile phones. It is developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and you can expect to see it in the near future. When this technology is used, it detects every lip movement and internally converts the electrical pulses into sounds signals and sends them neglecting all other surrounding noise. It is going to be really beneficial for the people who hate talking loudly on cell phones. " Silent Sound technology " aims to notice every movements of the lips and transform them into sounds, which could help people who lose voices to speak, and allow people to make silent calls without bothering others. Rather than making any sounds, your handset would decipher the movements your mouth makes by measuring muscle activity, then convert this into speech that the person on the other end of the call can hear. So, basically, it reads our lips. Another important benefit of this technology is that it allows you to communicate to any person in the world as the electrical pulse is universal, it can be converted into any language depending upon the users choice. This technology can be used for languages like English, French & German but not for languages like Chinese because different tones hold different meaning in Chinese language. This new technology will be very helpful whenever a person loses his voice while speaking or allow people to make silent calls without disturbing others, thus now we can speak anything with our friends or family in private without anyone eavesdropping. At the other end, the listener can hear a clear voice. This device works with 99% efficiency, and can been seen in the market in another 5-10 years and once launched it will have a drastic effect and with no doubt it will be widely used.

… Design and Evaluation for Mobile …, 2008

The use of a voice interface, along with textual, graphical, video, tactile, and audio interfaces, can improve the experience of the user of a mobile device. Many applications can benefit from voice input and output on a mobile device, including applications that provide travel directions, weather information, restaurant and hotel reservations, appointments and reminders, voice mail, and e-mail. We have developed a prototype system for a mobile device that supports client-side, voice-enabled applications. In fact, the prototype supports multimodal interactions but, here, we focus on voice interaction. The prototype includes six voice-enabled applications and a program manager that manages the applications. In this chapter we describe the prototype, including design issues that we faced, and evaluation methods that we employed in developing a voice-enabled user interface for a mobile device.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

Speech and/or hearing impaired people have difficulties with voice communication. In case of face-to-face conversation they can find a common communication channel (e.g. sign language, paper, etc.), but without an appropriate system they are unable to talk over the phone. The goal of the present study is to introduce the design and development steps of a system for vocally and/or hearing impaired people, which helps them to communicate via telephone with any person. Speech output is realized by text-to-speech (TTS) technology and speech input is provided by automatic speech recognition (ASR). The visual and the speech user interfaces enable users on both side of the phone line (a speech and hearing impaired person at one end, a non-speechand-hearing-disabled person at the other end) to communicate.

Proceedings of the 27th …, 2009

In this paper we present a system that simulates urgency-augmented phone calls on mobile phones. Different scenarios and interaction techniques are discussed. We report a user study that indicates a general need for such a system and explored the applicability ...