The Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh has produced a prototype system called The Ambient Spotlight, designed as an assistive productivity tool for meetings. The Ambient Spotlight is a portable system, based on personal meeting capture using a laptop and Dev-Audio’s Microcone.

The concept of the Ambient Spotlight is to bring attention to related documents when the user is reviewing meetings. In this context documents can be anything on the user’s laptop including captured meetings, presentations, emails, podcasts and PDF documents. Queries are made in an ambient fashion in the sense that no query terms are entered by the user, but keywords are automatically determined by filtering the output of speech recognition software.

The system automatically recognises and structures meeting content using automatic speech recognition, topic segmentation and extractive summarisation. The recognised speech in the meeting is used to construct queries to automatically link meeting segments to other relevant material, both multimodal and textual. The interface to the system is constructed around a standard calendar interface, and it is integrated with the laptop's standard indexing, search and retrieval.

The Ambient Spotlight integrates a number of existing technologies:

• Microcone Recorder for recording meetings
• Multi-party Speech Recognition
• Automatic annotation of topics and extractive summaries
• Apple's Spotlight technology for indexing and searching content
• Google Data API for access to calendar data

More information on the project, including contact details, publications and a video demonstration, can be found on The Ambient Spotlight project website.