Audio cloud: creation and rendering

Word clouds are extensively used to present a summary of the prominent words in a document on the World Wide Web. Such clouds give the user an idea about the content of the document. In this paper we present a mechanism to create and render an audio cloud for audio content. Such audio clouds are expected to provide a similar summary of the audio documents. They have wide applicability in various domains, especially for low-literate users who currently do not use the Internet but interact with audio-based systems. Detecting words from an audio content is challenging, especially if the audio is in languages for which a speech recognition system does not exist. We present a language-independent mechanism to detect frequently occurring words within an audio document. We then present four ways to render these words that form an audio cloud. The four prototypes for rendering the audio cloud are based on varying the amplitude, the voice quality, echo and the repetition of audio words. An evaluation study conducted across 32 users suggests that literate and low-literate users easily understand the concept of audio cloud.