Advances in automatic meeting record creation and access

Oral communication is transient but many important decisions, social contracts and fact findings are first carried out in an oral setup, documented in written form and later retrieved. At Carnegie Mellons University’s Interactive Systems Laboratories we have been experimenting with the documentation of meetings. This paper summarizes part of the progress that we have made in this test bed, specifically on the question of automatic transcription using LVCSR, information access using non-keyword based methods, summarization and user interfaces. The system is capable to automatically construct a searchable and browsable audiovisual database of meetings and provide access to these records. 1