Audio Wiz

2010 Technology and Deaf Education Symposium  
AudioWiz (Session M10B)

Mobile Retroactive Audio Transcription and Description for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Individuals

Jeffrey P Bigham, Assistant Professor, University of Rochester

Anna Cavender, University of Washington Symposium Resources available: Captioning; photo; session summary Take Aways Audio Wiz is an in-development tool that can be used in conjunction with a Smart phone to capture audio events (up to 60 seconds) for the purpose of obtaining a quick description of the event. The developers rely on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (small fee) and a pool of recruited transcribers to describe audio events. Jeffrey demonstrated the application live with his cell phone and did receive a quick text response (less than 2 minutes) at a low cost (About 5 cents/question). The application would be useful for hard-of-hearing persons who knew that they had missed an audio event (such as a PA system announcement in an airport) and had no one available to interpret. The presenter described a similar application, Scribe4Me, developed by Georgia Tech researchers a few years ago. Technical challenges present at the time that Scribe4Me was developed are no longer barriers (3G and 4G wireless networks; less powerful devices). I was intrigued by the idea of using the in-place capabilities of a smart phone as a solution to a complex problem and am convinced that these devices will become ubiquitous replacements for personal computers within the next few years. While employing Mechanical Turk workers to transcribe audio events may seem a bit clunky, it did work and was, I thought, a low tech solution. No programming needed. Access more blog postings.of more symposium sessions (scroll to bottom of linked blog posting).