OK, we're on.

Yeah.

So, I think this is gonna be a pretty short meeting because I have four agenda items, three of them were requested by Jane who is not gonna be at the meeting today.  So. The uh first was transcription status. Does anyone besides Jane know what the transcription status is?

Um, sort of, I do, peripherally.

Is that English?

Um Well first of all with IBM I got a note from Brian yesterday saying that they finally made the tape for the thing that we sent them a week or week and a half ago

That's our system.

Ugh!

and that it's gone out to the transcribers and hopefully next week we'll have the transcription back from that.

C can I have a pen?

Um Jane seems to be um moving right along on the transcriptions from the ICSI side. She's assigned, I think probably five or six m more meetings.

Yeah, I think we're up to MR thirteen or something.

Mmm.

Yeah, so um, I guess she's hired some new transcribers

Speaking.

Which meetings is she transcribing?

and Um well we've we've run out of E D Us because a certain number of them are um, sort of awaiting to go to IBM.

OK.

For IBM, yeah.

Hmm.

OK.

and the rest are in process being transcribed uh here.

So does she have transcribers right now who are basically sitting idle because there's no data back from IBM

So we're doing some in parallel.

Yep.

No.

No, no.

Oh no no.

We haven't done that process.

no?

No. We're not waiting on them.

So. They' r they're doing the full transcription process.

Oh. Oh, OK.

So they're just doing their own thing until.

Yeah.

Because I I need to ask Jane whether it's it would be OK for her um, s some of her people to transcribe uh some of the initial data we got from the SmartKom data collection, which is these short like five or seven minute sessions.

We're doing it in parallel, yeah.

OK.

Yep.

Um and we want it You know, we need The Again, we we have a similar uh logistic set - up where we are supposed to send the data to Munich

Right.

and get it transcribed and get it back. But to get going we would like some of the data transcribed right away so we can get started.

Yep, sounds familiar.

And so um I wanted to ask Jane if if uh, you know, maybe one of their transcribers could could do I mean since these are very short, that should really be uh,

Mm - hmm.

um It's.

There's only two channels. So it's only Yeah.

Yeah.

As the synthesis doesn't have to be transcribed I think.

It's only two Right, s

So.

Yeah. So So it's basically one channel to transcribe. And it's One session is only uh like seven.

So that should have ma many fewer And it's also not uh a bunch of interruptions with people and all that,

Right. And some of it is read speech, so we could give them the the thing that they're reading

right? So. Yeah.

and they just may.

Make sure it's right.

Yep.

And so um, um, I guess since she's I was gonna ask her but since she's not around I maybe I'll.

Yeah, well it certainly seems.

Uh if if that's OK with you to to, you know, get that stuff uh to ask her for that, then I'll do that.

Yeah. Yeah, if we're held up on this other stuff a little bit in order to encompass that, that's OK because I I um, I mean I still have high hopes that the that the IBM pipeline'll work out for us, so it's.

Yeah. OK, yeah.

Yeah.

Alrighty.

Oh, yeah, and also related to the transcription stuff, so I've been trying to keep a web page uh up to date f showing what the current status is of the trans of all the things we've collected and what stage each meeting is in, in terms of whether it's.

Can you mail that out to the list?

Mm - hmm, yeah I will. I That's the thing that I sent out just to foo people saying can you update these pages

Oh, OK, OK.

and so that's where I'm putting it but I'll I'll send it out to the list telling people to look at it.

Yeah, I haven't done that. So. I have lots of stuff to add that's just in my own directory.

Yeah.

I'll try to get to that. OK. So Jane also wanted to talk about participant approval, but I don't really think there's much to talk about. I'm just gonna do it. And uh, if anyone objects too much then they can do it instead.

You are going to.

I'm gonna send out to the participants, uh, with links to web pages which contain the transcripts and allow them to suggest edits. And then bleep them out.

OK.

For the ones that we have. Um.

So but it's just transcripts, not the not the audio?

Nope, they'll have access to the audio also.

OK, yeah, yep. Ah.

I mean that's my intention. Because the transcripts might not be right.

Yeah.

So.

So you want people to be able to listen to them.

Yeah.

So, um the audio that they're gonna have access to, will that be the uncompressed version? Or will you have scripts that like uncompress the various pieces and.

Oh, that's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah, it's it's probably going to have to be the uncompressed versions because, uh, uh, it takes too long to do random access decompression.

Hmm. Yeah, I was just wondering because we're uh running out of the un - backed - up disk space on

Well, that was the other point.

Oh, was that another one?

Yep, that's another agenda item.

OK. I'll wait.

So, uh But that is a good point so we'll get to that, too. Um, DARPA demo status, not much to say. The back - end stuff is working out fine. It's more or less ready to go. I've added some stuff that uh indes indexes by the meeting type MR, EDU, et cetera and also by the user ID. So that the front - end can then do filtering based on that as well. Uh The back - end is uh, going more slowly as I s I think I said before just cuz I'm not much of a Tcl - TK programmer. And uh Dave Gelbart says he's a little too busy. So I think Don and I are gonna work on that and and you and I can just talk about it off - line more.

Right.

But uh the back - end was pretty smooth.

Oh

So I think, we'll have something. It may not be as As pretty as we might like, but we'll have something.

I wondered whe when we would reach Dave's saturation point. He's sort of been been volunteering for everything

Yeah.

and and uh.

Mm - hmm.

O K. Finally said he was too busy. I guess we reached it.

Yeah, he he actually he volunteered but then he s then he retracted it. So. Oh well. Um.

And, also um, I was just showing Andreas, I got um an X Waves kind of display, and I don't know how much more we can do with it with like the prosodic stuff where we have like stylized pitches and signals and the transcripts on the bottom

Oh, cool.

so, right now it's just an X Waves and then you have three windows but I don't know, it looked pretty nice and I'm sure it think it has potential for a little something,

For a demo?

yeah, for a demo.

Yeah, sounds good.

So.

OK, so again, the issue is For July, the issue's gonna be what can we fit into a Windows machine, uh, and so on, but.

Oh. OK.

So it might just be slides.

Yeah, OK.

Well Yeah.

Well, we'll see, um.

I've been putting together uh Transcriber things for Windows so i And I installed it on Dave Gelbart's PC and it worked just fine. So hopefully that will work.

Really? So is that Because there's some people um It would be cool if we could uh get that to work uh at at SRI

Yeah. Yep.

because the um.

Well Transcriber is Tcl - TK, very generic with Snack,

we have m m We have more Windows machines to run the.

Yeah.

so basically anything you can get Snack to run on, it will work.

Right.

Yeah. Yeah but But the problem is the version Transcriber works with, the Snack version, is one point six whatever and that's not anymore supported. It's not on on the web page anymore. But I just wrote an email to to the author of to the Snack author and he sent me to one point six whatever library

Well I thought it was packaged with Transcriber?

and so it works. Yeah, but then you can't add our patches and then the the new version is is totally different

Oh.

a and in yeah, in terms of of the source code.

Ah.

You you can't find the Tcl files anymore. It's some whatever wrapped thing

Mmm.

and you can't you can't access that so you have to install First install Tcl then install Snack and then install the Transcriber thing and then do the patches.

Patch. Ugh!

I I wonder if if we should contribute our changes back to the authors so that they maintain those changes along.

Yeah. Yeah.

We have Yeah b it's just hasn't made it into the release yet.

We have? Oh. Oh, OK.

So did you um put the uh the NT version out on the uh Meeting Recorder page? Or.

No, I haven't done that yet. I'm oh Nope. But I definitely will do that.

So, can some of the stuff that Don's talking about somehow fit into this Uh, mean you just have a set of numbers that are associated with the.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah, it's basically ASCII files or binary files, whatever representation. Just three different It's a waveform and just a stylized pitch vector basically so it's.

So So Well.

I mean we could do it in Matl -  I mean you could do it in a number of different places I'm sure.

But But it would be cool if the Transcriber interface had like another window for the you know, maybe above the waveform where it would show some arbitrary valued function that is that is you know time synchron ti ti time synchronous with the wavform.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, that'd be very cool.

It'd be easy enough to add that. Again it's it's It's more Tcl - T

Yeah.

So someone who's familiar with Tcl - TK has to do it,

Right.

but uh, it wouldn't be hard to do.

Right. But it would almost be like having another waveform displayed.

Yep.

Yep.

S

Mm - hmm.

Right.

Yeah. Yeah, maybe we could l look into that.

Yeah.

But it it seems to me that I c

And.

It doesn't seem like having that real time is that necessary. So yo It seems to me you could do images.

Um What do you mean by real time? Do you mean like.

Like being able to scroll through it and stuff for the demo.

OK.

Yeah, jus Yeah.

Is that what you mean?

It just seems to me jus

It would be cool to see it.

Yeah.

It would be cool like to see to hear it and see it,

And to hear it. Yeah. Yeah.

and see the pitch contours also.

Sure, but I don't think I You can do all that just statically in

Yeah.

I think it would lose Yeah, I mean y

Just record the audio clip and show an image and I think that's.

Right, right. I just thought if you meant slides I thought you meant like just like um view graphs or something.

You know, wh Yeah. So. Uh, no, we're talking about on the computer and and um, I think when we were talking about this before we had littl this little demo meeting,

Right.

we sort of set up a range of different degrees of liveness that you could have and, the more live, the better, but uh, given the crunch of time, we may have to retreat from it to some extent. So I think For a lot of reasons, I think it would be very nice to have this Transcriber interface be able to show some other interesting signal along with it

Mm - hmm.

so it'd be a good thing to get in there. But, um Anyway, jus just looking for ways that we could actually show what you're doing, uh, in to people.

Mm - hmm.

Cuz a lot of this stuff, particularly for Communicator, uh certainly a significant chunk of the things that we waved our arms about th originally had t had to do with prosodics It'd be nice to show that we can actually get them and see them.

Mmm.

Mm - hmm.

And the last i item on the agenda is disk issues yet again. So, we're doing OK on backed up. We're We're only about thirty percent on the second disk. So, uh, we have a little bit of time before that becomes critical, but we are like ninety five percent, ninety eight percent on the scratch disks for the expanded meetings.

Yeah.

And, my original intention was like we would just delete them as we needed more space, but unfortunately we're in the position where we have to deal with all the meeting data all at once, in a lot of different ways.

Yeah.

Oh there's a lot of transcribers, too.

Yeah, there're a lot of transcribers,

Yeah.

so all of those need to be expanded, and then people are doing chunking and I want to do uh, uh, uh, the permission forms,

Mm - hmm.

An

Right.

so I want those to be live, so there's a lot of data that has to be around. Um And Jane was gonna talk to, uh, Dave Johnson about it. One of the things I was thinking is we we just got these hundred alright, excuse me ten, uh SPARC - Blade SUN - Blades.

Did they come in?

SUN - Blades.

Yeah.

Yeah. They came in the other day.

They came in but they're not set up yet.

Oh.

And so it seems to me we could hang scratch disk on those because they'll be in the machine room, they'll be on the fast connection to the rest of the machines. And if we just need un - backed - up space, we could just hang disks off them.

Well, is there Why not just hang them off of Abbott, is there a.

Because there's no more room in the disk racks on Abbott.

Yeah.

Ah.

Weren't we gonna get.

Ah, I see.

Well, maybe it should get another rack.

But you still need to store the disks somehow.

Well, but the SUN - Blades have spare drive bays.

So.

Just put them in.

You can put two.

Oh you mean you put them inside the pizza boxes for the.

Sure.

Internal. Yeah.

Yeah. Cuz the SUN uh, these SUN - Blades take commodity hard drives.

Oh.

So you can just go out and buy a PC hard drive and stick it in.

Mmm.

But if Abbott is going to be our disk server it it file server  it seems like we would want to get it, uh, a second disk rack or something.

Plus we're talking about buying a second dis uh, file server.

Well, I mean there are lots of long term solutions. What I'm looking for is where do we s expand the next meeting?

Yep.

I see Oh, I see.

Well, for the next meeting you might be out of luck with those ten, mightn't you? Uh, you know Dave Johnson is gone for, like, ten days,

Oh, I didn't know he had left already.

Uh, well, tonight.

Oh, oh well.

You mean he won't set up the mmm.

I don't know.

How much space do you need for these?

I don't know what his schedule is.

You we need about a gig per meeting.

I'm just saying he's gone.

Yep.

I I thi

I have um I have an eighteen gig drive hanging off of my computer.

Alright! What's your computer's name?

So Uh, Samosa.

You had an eighteen gigabyte drive.

Yeah, I had. Well it's about I think there's about twelve gig left.

So it And you have an X drives installed? OK.

Yeah. So, I didn't realize it was so critical.

And you're o you're offering?

I mean I'm not doing anything on it right now until I get new meetings to transcri or that are new transcriptions coming in I really can't do anything.

OK.

Um not that I can't do anything, I jus

I I jus I just gave Thilo some about ten gigs, the last ten gigs of space that there was on on uh Abbott. Uh And uh So but that But.

Which one was that, X G? X G?

XG.

XG.

OK.

XG?

Yeah.

That's also where we store the The uh Hub - five training set waveforms,

Oops.

But that won't be getting any bigger,

right?

No.

will it?

I don't think that's on XG.

Right.

On XG is only Carmen and Du - and Stephane's disk.

It's Yeah.

But I've also been storing I've been storing the feature files there and I guess I can s start deleting some because we now know what the best features are

Well.

and we won't be using the old ones anymore.

I have a lot of space, though.

Yeah, I do I don't think it was on XG.

Uh Oh thats XA Oh that's X.

Isn't that XH?

I th

Not not for long.

I have a lot of space and it's not it's n There's very little uh Yeah not for long.

Maybe I'm confu

But I mean it's not going f

Oh no I'm sorry.

It's not being used often at all.

But I'm using XH H, too.

Yeah, it's probably Probably only about four gig is on X on your X drive,

So.

Oh OK.

but we'll definitely take it up if you.

I th

I think you're right. It's XH and D.

I think it's about four or five gig cuz I have four meetings on there,

The b I'm also using DG I got that confused.

three or four meetings.

OK.

Great.

So.

OK, so that will get us through the next couple days.

We need We need another gigaquad.

Yep. At least.

There should I d There should just be a b I should have a button.

The " more disk space " button?

Just press Press each meeting saying " we need more disk space " " this week ".

Yep.

Skip the rest of the conversation.

Well we've collected so far something like uh sixty - five meetings.

And And how much does each meeting take?

And it's about a gig uncompressed.

It's It's a little bit more as I usually don't do not uncompress the all of the PZM and the PDA things.

Is a little more?

So.

Right, yeah so if you uncompressed everything it's even more.

It's Yeah. One point five or something.

U Uh compressed how much are they? Like.

Half a gig. For all of them.

About half?

Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

So we're definitely are storing you know, all of those. So there's what thirty some gig of just meetings so far?

So - so So maybe there's a hundred gig or something. Or I mean. Cuz we we have the uncompressed around also.

Mm - hmm. Right.

So it's like.

Yeah.

Right. Well we We haven't uncompressed all the meetings, but.

I would like to.

Yeah. Well I mean it's the they really are cheap. I mean it's just a question of figuring out where they should be and hanging them,

Yep.

Right.

but But uh, we could You know, if you want to get four disks, get four disks. I mean it's it's small I mean these things ar are just a few hundred dollars.

Yeah. Well I sent that message out to, I guess, you and Dave asking for if we could get some disk.

Yeah.

I s I sent this out a a day ago

And put it where?

Right.

but and Dave didn't respond so I don I don't know how the whole process works. I mean does he just go out and get them and if it's OK, and.

Yep.

So I was assuming he was gonna take over that. But he's probably too busy given that he's leaving.

Yeah, I think you need a direct conversation with him. And just say an - e just ask him that, you know, wha what should you do. And in my answer back was " are you sure you just want one? " So I mean I think that what you want to do is plan ahead a little bit and figure " well, here's what we pi figure on doing for the next few months ".

Yeah.

Wa - a I know what they want. The sysadmins would prefer to have one external drive per machine. So they don't want to stack up external drives.

Yeah.

Um And then they want everything else in the machine room.

Right.

So the question is where are you gonna hang them?

Mm - hmm. I don't know what the space situation is in the machine room.

Right.

So.

Right. So this is a question that's pretty hard to solve without talking to Dave,

Th - The.

I think part of the reason why Dave can't get the the new machines up is because he doesn't have room in the machine room right now.

cuz it.

One Mmm.

Yep.

One One On - One thing to in to um t to do when you need to conserve space is

So he has to re - arrange a bunch of stuff.

I bet there are still some old, uh, like, nine gig disks, uh, around and you can probably consolidate them onto larger disks and and you know recover the space.

Yep.

Yeah. No. I think Dave Dave knows all these things, of course. An - and so, he always has a a lot of plans of things that he's gonna do to make things better in many ways an and runs out of time.

Right. Mm - hmm.

But I I know that generally their first priority has been for backed up disk. And so I think what he's been concentrating on is uh the back the back up system, rather than on new disk.

Mmm. Mmm.

So. Which.

Well. So. But this this is a very specific question for me. Basically, we can easily get one to four disks, I mean you just go out and get four and we've got the money for it, it's no big deal. Uh, but the question is where they go, and I don't think we can solve that here, you just have to ask him.

Maybe we can put some disks in the in that back room there.

Yeah really.

Attach to.

Popcorn.

Yeah?

To the machine that collects the data. So then you could, at least temporarily, store stuff there.

Yeah, it's just It's not on the net, so it's a little awkward

The only.

Hmm.

What do you mean it's not on the net?

It's not.

It's not bad.

It's behind lots of fire walls that don't allow any services through except S S

Oh because it's because it's an ACIRI machine?

Yep.

Yeah.

Oh, oh oh.

And also on the list is to get it into the normal ICSI net, but Who knows when that will happen?

But that can't be that hard.

That might be a good short term solution, though.

I mean.

No, the the problem with that apparently is that they don't currently have a wire running to that back room that goes anywhere near one of the ICSI routers.

Oh,

So, they actually have to run a wire somewhere.

Yeah. Yeah, e again, you know, any one of these things is certainly not a big deal. If there was a person dedicated to doing it they would happen pretty easily but it's it's jus every ever everybody everybody has a has.

But Dave has to do all of them.

Well all of us have long lists of different things we're doing. But at any rate I think that there's a there's a longer term thing and there's immediate need and I think we need a a conversation with Uh, maybe maybe after after tea or something you and I can go down and and talk to him about it Just say " wha you know, what should we do right now? "

How long is David gonna be gone?

Uh, eleven days or something?

Oh my!

Yeah basically tomorrow and all of the week after.

And that's all I have.

Um Let's see. The only oth thing other thing I was gonna add was that um uh, I talked briefly to Mari and uh we had both been busy with other things so we haven't really connected that much since the last meeting we had here but we agreed that we would have a telephone meeting the Friday after next. And I I I wanted to make it, um after the next one of these meetings, so something that we wanna do next meeting is is uh to put together um, a kind of reasonable list for ourselves of what is it, um, that we've done. I mean just sort of bulletize I mean o e do do I can I can dream up text but this is basically gonna lead to the annual report. So Um If w

Mm - hmm.

This is the fifteenth? So just a week from tomorrow?

Um, that would

OK.

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, we can This So that's an.

Is this gotta be in the morning?

Um.

Or Because you know I Fridays I have to leave uh like around uh two. So if it could be before that would be be

No, no but I I I don't need other folks for the meeting. I can do it. A A All I'm saying is that on.

Oh, OK, alright. Oh I'm sorry, I misunderstood.

Yeah so what I meant was on the me this meeting if I wa something I I I'm making a major thing in the agenda is I wanna help in getting together a list of what it is that we've done so I can tell her.

I thought you are OK. Alright. Mm - hmm.

I think I have a pretty good idea

OK.

but but um Uh, and then the next day uh, late in the day I'll be having that that discussion with her.

Mmm.

Um. So.

Um Uh One thing I mean we in past meetings we had um also a you know various variously talked about the um work that w uh was happening sort of on the on the recognition side

Mm - hmm.

um but isn't necessarily related to meetings uh specifically. So. Um. And I wondered whether we should maybe have um a separate meeting and between you know, whoever's interested in that because I feel that uh there's plenty of stuff to talk about but it would be sort of um maybe the wrong place to do it in this meeting if uh.

Think so?

Well, it's that It's just gonna be ver very boring for people who are not you know, sort of really interested in the details of the recognition system.

I'm interested.

Well, OK, so how many how many people here would not be interested in uh in a meeting about recognition?

Me too.

Jane may not be.

Jane, I think.

Yep.

Well I know Well, Jane an Well you mean in a separate meeting or ha ha talking about it in this.

No. If we talked about it in this meeting.

He's wondering how much overlap there will be.

Yeah, so you're su

OK.

So.

So, uh, uh, Liz and Jane probably.

OK, so we're gonna have a guy's meeting.

Uh. Uh, if you wanna put it that way.

Good thing Liz isn't here.

Real.

Watch a ball game?

Yeah, real real real men " Real men do decoding " or something like that.

Don't listen to this, Liz.

Right.

Uh.

I mean it it's sort of I mean when when the talk is about data collection stuff, sometimes I've you know, I I'm bored.

Yeah.

The Nod off?

So it's I c I can sympathize with them not wanting to i to to be uh you know If I cou you know this could.

It's cuz y you have a So you need a better developed feminine side.

I'm

There's probably gonna be a lot of " bleeps " in this meeting.

not sure I wanna.

Yeah, I would as  I would guess.

Uh. Um.

Yeah and.

I think it must be uh nearing the end of the week. Um. Yeah. I You know, I I've heard some comments about like this. That m could be.

Mm - hmm.

I mean the Um. U

And we don't have to do it every week.

Could we.

We could do it every other week or so. You know, whatev or whenever we feel like we.

Right, I was Why don't we alternate this meeting every other week?

Or just alternate the focus.

Tha - That's what I mean.

Yeah, so on even weeks have basic on data.

Yeah.

We could do that, yeah.

Yeah.

I I Personally I'd I'm not in favor of more meetings. Um. Because, uh.

Right.

I am.

You know.

Oh sor

But I do I don't I mean a lot of times lately it seems like we don't really have enough for a full meeting on Meeting Recorder.

Right.

Well, except that we keep going for our full time.

So if we did that.

Yep.

Well, cuz we get into these other topics.

Yeah.

We feel We feel obligated to collect more data.

Yeah.

Ugh.

Yeah.

I don't.

So if we could alternate the focus of the meeting.

Let's read digits and go.

Why don't we just start with that.

ummh.  ummh.  OK.

And then if we find, you know we're just not getting enough done, there's all these topics not coming up, then we can expand into another meeting.

Mm - hmm.

But I I think that's a great idea. Uh. So uh. Um. Let's chat about it with Liz and Jane when we get a chance, see what they think and.

Mm - hmm.

Yeah that would be good. I mean Andreas and I have various talks in the halls

Mm - hmm.

and there's lots of things, you know, details and stuff that would I think people'd be interested in and I'd you know, where do we go from here kind of things and So, it would be good.

Yeah, and you're you're attending the uh the front - end meeting as well as the others so you have you have probably one of the best you and I, I guess are the main ones who sort of see the bridge between the two.

Bridge.

Mm - hmm.

We are doing recognition in both of them. So.

Mm - hmm.

Right.

Uh.

OK?

So um. So so we could talk a little bit about that now if if there's some time.

No, no that would be for next week.

Um I jus So the latest result was that um um yot I tested the uh the sort of final version of the PLP configuration um on development test data for for this year's Hub - five test set.

Mm - hmm.

And the recognition performance was exactly, and I mean exactly up to the you know, the first decimal, same as with the uh Mel Cepstra front - end.

Mmm.

For both females and males?

Yes. Uh, well i there was a little bit of a.

Oh!

i overall. They They were The males I think were slightly better and the females were slightly worse but nothing really.

Mm - hmm.

Mm - hmm.

I mean definitely not significant.

Mm - hmm.

And then the really nice thing was that if if we combine the two systems we get a one and a half percent improvement.

Wow. Just with ROVER?

So. t With N - best ROVER, which is like our new and improved version of ROVER.

Mm - hmm.

Which u actually uses the whole N - best list from both systems to mmm, uh c combine that.

So except I mean the only key difference between the two really is the kind of smoothing at the end which is the auto - regressive versus the cepstral truncation.

Yeah.

OK.

And, the.

But a percent and a half?

Yeah, it's pretty impressive.

That's.

And And so uh after I told the my uh colleagues at SRI about that, you know, now they definitely want to, you know, uh, have a Next time we have an evaluation they want to do uh, you know, basically a at least the system combination. Um, and, you know, why not?

Sure, why not?

Uh. So.

We clearly gotta add a few more features, though.

Uh w what do you mean? More features in the sense of front - end features or in the sense of just bells and whistles?

No, uh front - end features. You know we did PLP and Mel Cepstra. Let's, you know, try RASTA and MSG, and.

Oh I mean Yeah. Well Right. So, we cou Yeah. That's the the the There's one thing uh I mean you don't want to overdo it because y every front - end You know, if you you know you basically multiply your effort by N, where N is a number of different systems

Oh.

Mm - hmm.

and Um. So. So one one compromise would be to only to have the everything up to the point where you generate lattices be basically one system and then after that you rescore your lattices with the multiple systems and combine the results and that's a fairly painless um thing.

Mmm. An

So.

Do you think we'd still get the one and a half uh.

I I think so. Yeah. Maybe a little less because at that point the error rates are lower and so if You know, maybe it's only one percent or something but that would still be worthwhile doing.

Mm - hmm.

So. Um Jus - You know, just wanted to let you know that that's working out very nicely.

Cool.

And then we had some results on digits, uh, with um We We So this was uh really  really sort of just to get Dave going with his um experiments.

Mm - hmm.

And so, uh. But as a result, um, you know, we were sort of wondering why is the Hub - five system doing so well on the digits.

Right.

And the reason is basically there's a whole bunch of read speech data in the Hub - five training set.

Right.

Including digits I gather, yeah.

And you c And Not all of No it's actually, digits is only a maybe a fifth of it.

A fifth of it is how much?

The rest is is read is read TIMIT data and uh ATIS data and Wall Street Journal and stuff like that.

Right. But a fi a fifth is how much?

A fifth would be maybe uh two hours something.

Yeah, so I mean that's actually not that different from the amount of training that there was.

Right.

So.

But it definitely helps to have the other read data in there

Oh yeah

because we're doing.

w

You know the error rate is half of what you do if you train only on ti uh TIMIT  uh not TIMIT uh TI - digits,

Mm - hmm.

which is only what two hours something?

Right.

I don't know.

So. Uh, more read speech data definitely helps. And you can leave out all the conversational data with no performance penalty.

Yeah that was the interesting thing.

That's e

Because because uh, it was apparent if you put in a bunch more data it would be better,

That was e Right, right.

but but uh.

Right.

Well is there even more read speech data around?

Oh, yeah. So we only for the Hub - five training, we're only using uh a fairly small subset of the Macrophone database.

Mm - hmm.

Um, so, you could beef that up and probably do even better.

I could also put in uh focus condition zero from Hub - four from Broadcast News, which is mostly prepared speech.

Mm - hmm.

It's not exactly read speech but it's pretty darn close.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, I mean that's plenty of read speech data. I mean, Wall Street Journal, uh, take one example.

Yeah. That's right.

But um. So, you know that might be useful for the people who train the the digit recognizers to to use uh something other than TI - digits.

Yeah.

Well they been using TIMIT.

OK.

That Uh. They they uh they experimented for a while with a bunch of different databases with French and Spanish and so forth cuz they're multilingual tests

Mm - hmm.

and and uh, um, and actually the best results they got wa were uh using TIMIT.

Hmm.

Uh But uh which So that's what they're they're using now.

Mmm.

But but yeah certainly if we, um If we knew what the structure of what we're doing there was. I mean there's still a bunch of messing around with different kinds of uh noise robustness algorithms.

Mm - hmm.

So we don't know exactly which combination we're gonna be going with.

Mm - hmm.

Once we know, then the trainable parts of it it'd be great to run lots of lots of stuff through.

Mm - hmm. Right. Well, that was that. And then I th guess Chuck and I had some discussions about how to proceed with the tandem uh system and You wanna You wanna see where that stands?

Well, I'm.

Yeah, so Andreas uh brought over the uh alignments that the SRI system uses. And so I'm in the process of um converting those alignments into uh label files that we can use to train uh a new net with. And uh so then I'll train the net. And.

An - And one side effect of that would be that it's um that the phone set would change. So the MLP would be trained on I think only forty - six or forty - eight.

Right. Eight.

forty - eight phones?

Mm - hmm.

Uh which is smaller than the um than the phone set that that we've been using so far.

Yeah.

And that that that will probably help, actually,

So it's a little different?

because um the fewer dimensions uh e the less trouble probably with the as far as just the um, um Just You know we want to try things like deltas on the tandem features. And so you h have to multiply everything by two or three. And so, you know, fewer dimensions in the phone set would be actually helpful just from a logistics point of view.

Sure. Although we I mean, it's not that many fewer and and and we take a KLT anyway so we could.

Right. Exactly.

Yeah.

So so that was the other thing. And then we wanted to s just limit it to maybe uh something on the same order of dimensions as we use in a standard um front - end. So that would mean just doing the top I don't know ten or twelve or something of the KLT dimensions.

Yeah, and I think and we sh again check we should check with Stephane. My impression was that when we did that before that had very little uh he didn't lose very much.

Right.

By just taking the top whatever?

Yep.

Yeah yeah.

But then And then something Once we have the new M L P trained up, uh one thing I wanted to try just for the fun of it was to actually run uh like a standard hybrid system that is based on you know, those features uh and uh retrain MLP and also the you know, the dictionary that we use for the Hub - five system.

And the b And the base u starting off with the base of the alignments that you got from i from a pretty decent system.

Exactly.

Right.

Yeah. So that would basically give us a, um, more hopefully a a better system

Yeah.

um because you know, compared to what Eric did a while ago, where he trained up, I think, a system based on Broadcast News and then uh tra retraining it on Switchboard or s uh and.

Yeah.

But he I think he d he didn't he probably didn't use all the training data that was available. And his dictionary probably wasn't as tuned to um conversational speech as as the as ours is.

That's That's certainly one thing, yeah.

So.

Uh. Yeah.

And the dictionary made a huge difference. Uh. We we made some improvements to the dictionary's uh to the dictionary about two years ago which resulted in a uh something like a four percent absolute error rate reduction on Switchboard, which.

Well the other thing is, dipping deep into history and into uh our resource management days, when we were collaborating with SRI before,

Mm - hmm. Mmm.

uh it was I think, it is was a really key uh starting point for us that we actually got our alignment.

Mm - hmm.

When we were working together we got our initial alignments from Decipher, uh at the time.

Mm - hmm. Yeah.

Uh. And. Later we got away from it because because once we had decent systems going then it was it was typically better to use our own systems

Yeah.

Mm - hmm.

cuz they were self consistent but but certainly to start off when we were trying to recover from our initial hundred and forty percent error uh rate. Uh. But that was a that was a good good good way to start.

Yeah.

And we're not quite that bad with our our Switchboard systems but it was they certainly aren't as good as SRI's,

OK. Yeah.

so.

Right.

W What is the performance on s the best Switchboard system that we've done? Roughly?

Well, the hybrid system we never got better than about fifty percent error. And uh it was I think there's just a whole lot of things that uh no one ever had time for. We never did really fix up the dictionary. Uh we always had a list of a half dozen things that we were gonna do and and a lot of them were pretty simple and we never did.

Yeah. Mmm.

Uh, we never did an never did any adaptation

But that w Even that that number.

uh, we never did any.

Right. And And that number I think was on Switchboard - one data, right? Where the error rate now is in the twenties.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, um.

So we were Yeah. We were probably at least a factor or two off.

That's yet s Right.

Yeah.

So it would be So it would be good t to sort of r re uh.

Yeah.

just at least to give us an idea of how well the hybrid system would do.

Yeah. But I think again it's Yeah. It's the conver it's the s conversational speech bit. Because our our Broadcast News system is actually pretty good.

Mm - hmm.

He knows.

Right. And the other thing that that would help us to evaluate is to see how well the M L P is trained up. Right? Because it's a pretty good um indicator of that.

Mm - hmm.

So it's sort of a sanity check of the M L P outputs before we go ahead and train up the uh you know, use them as a basis for the tandem system.

Mm - hmm.

Yeah. It'll still probably be worse. I mean, it's it'd be context independent and so on.

No. Sure. Not.

Should we Should we bother with um using the net before doing uh embedded training?

But.

But.

I mean should should we even use that?

Oh oh that's a good question.

Or should I just go straight to.

Yeah, we we weren't sure whether it's worth to just use the alignments um from the S R I recognizer or whether to actually go through one or more iterations of embedded training where you realign.

Try it. You run it? Keep keep both versions? See which one's better?

Uh, yeah. I mean. I think I agree with Ad I mean basically you would then You proceed with the embedded training.

Mm - hmm.

It's gonna take you a while to train at this net anyway.

Mm - hmm. Right.

And while it's training you may as well test the one you have and see how it did.

OK. Alright.

Mmm.

I could make arguments either way. You know, it's.

But But so I.

Sort of given up guessing.

Well but i But in your experience I mean uh have you seen big improvements in s on some tasks with embedded training? Or was it sort of small - ish uh improvements that you got

Uh well. It depended on the task. I mean I think in this one I would sort of expect it to be important

Right.

because we're coming from uh, alignments that were achieved with an extremely different system.

That are from another Right.

Although, I mean we've done it with When we were combining with the Cambridge recurrent neural net, embedded training made it worse.

Right.

Uh.

Which I've never figured out.

Right. But I mean i

I think it's a bug.

So you you started training with outputs from a with alignments that were generated by the Cambridge uh system?

Yep.

And then Uh.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hmm. Well, that might probably just Hmm. That was probably because your initial system I mean your system was ba worse than Cambridge's. And you Um.

Was it? I don't think it was.

No they were they were comparable.

It wasn't?

No.

They were very close.

Really?

Yeah.

That's weird.

Excuse me?

That's That's weird.

That's what I said.

Oh!

No I mean it's weird that it did I'm sorry. It's w It's weird that it got worse.

That's ambiguous.

Um. No. Uh. Tha - u we we've see I mean and wi with the numbers OGI numbers task we've seen a number of times people doing embedded trainings and things not getting better.

Oh actually it's not that weird because we have seen We have seen cases where acoustic retraining the acoustic models after some other change made matters worse rather than better.

Yeah. It just.

Yeah.

But I But I would I would suspect that something that that had um a very different Um feature set, for instance I mean they were using pretty diff similar feature sets to us.

Yep.

I I would expect that something that had a different feature set would would uh benefit from.

Mm - hmm.

What about uh hidden unit size on this.

Oh, wait a minute, and the other thing uh,

Oh.

sorry, it was the other thing is that what was in common  to the Cambridge system and our system is they both were training posteriors.

Right. Ah yeah.

So I mean, uh, that's another pretty big difference

That's another big difference.

and uh, one bac at least Back at.

You mean with soft targets? Or? Sorry, I'm sor I missed What What's the key issue here?

Oh, that uh both the Cambridge system and our system were were training posteriors. And if we're we're coming from alignments coming from the SRI system, it's a likelihood - based system. So so that's another difference.

Yeah.

I mean. You know, there's diffe different front - end different different uh, um, training criterion Uh, I would think that in a that an embedded uh embedded uh training would have at least a good shot of improving it some more.

Mm - hmm.

But we don't know.

OK.

You gonna say something?

Yeah. I was wondering uh you know what size net I should Anybody have any intuitions or suggestions?

Uh, how much training data?

Well, I was gonna start off with the small train set.

And how How many hours is that?

That's why I was I I'm not sure how much that is.

Uh, I think that has about Well i you'd would be gender - dependent training, right? So So I think it's uh that's about mmm, something like thirty hours.

Gender - dependent, yeah.

Thirty hours per gender.

Thirty hours.

I'm not sure what this'll mean.

In the small training set?

Hello?

I I think so. I'll.

Excuse me?

It's definitely less than a hundred.

Alright.

You know, it's more like like thirty forty hours something like that.

Wrong number.

They called to tell us that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um. So. Uh. after run

I mean, I didn't want to do too big,

Right. So

just.

At least a couple thousand hidden units. I mean. It's it's th the thing I'll I'll think about it a little more

Mm - hmm.

but it it'd be toss up between two thousand and four thousand.

Mmm.

You definitely wouldn't want the eight thousand. It's m It's more than.

And a thousand is too small?

Oh let me think about it, but I think that that uh th at some point there's diminishing returns. I mean it doesn't actually get worse, typically,

Mm - hmm.

Mm - hmm.

but it but but there is diminishing returns and you're doubling the amount of time.

Remember you'll have a smaller output layer so there's gonna be fewer parameters there.

But not by a lot.

Not by much.

And then.

Fifty s Fifty four to forty eight?

Vast majority is from the input unit.

Yeah.

OK. Yeah.

Yeah. It'll have a very tiny effect.

Right, because you used the context windows and so the input to hidden is much, much larger.

Yeah.

Oh I see, I see, yeah, of course.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's negligible, OK.

Yeah, so it's it'd be way, way less than ten percent of the difference.

Uh - huh.

Uh. There's uh How bi how big Let's see. What am I trying to think of?

The The net that that we did use already uh was eight thousand hidden units and that's the one that Eric trained up.

Right. And that was trained up on uh like a hundred and forty hours of of speech.

Was that gender - dependent or independent?

Gender - dependent.

Oh. So that would be like trained on s sixty or seventy hours.

Mm - hmm.

So, uh, yeah definitely not the one thousand uh two thousand fr I mean the four thousand will be better and the two thousand will be almost will be faster and almost as good.

It'll be faster.

So.

Yeah.

Mm - hmm.

Maybe I'll start off with two thousand just to see.

Yeah.

OK.

OK.

Yeah, thirty hours is like a hundred and ten thousand uh seconds. Uh, so that's like eleven eleven million frames. And a two thousand hidden unit net is uh I guess about seven, eight hundred thousand parameters. So that's probably That's probably fine. I mean a four thousand is well within the range that you could benefit from but the two thousand'd be faster so.

Right. I actually have to go.

Alright.

So.

Uncle Bernie's rule is ten to one. Bernie Woodrow's Rule of yeah Uncle Bernie yeah.

We're just waiting for you to leave.

Yes sir.

Anything else?

Nah.

OK.

Since we have nothing to talk about we only talked for an hour.

If.

So.

yeah that's right.

Yeah.

Uh, well, we started late.

Transcript

de - ba - de. de - ba - de That's all folks!

Question: What were the key points <speaker> emphasized during the meeting?

Response: The meeting does not contain answer to this question.

Question: Besides the main topics discussed, were there other agenda items or additional discussions during the meeting?

Response:
* The participants discussed the possibility of using some of the transcribed data from the SmartKom data collection for initial transcription by human transcribers.
* Andreas presented a visualization tool that displays the transcribed text, audio waveform, stylized pitch vector, and X-waves.
* The participants discussed the possibility of creating a new disk rack to solve disk space issues in the machine room.
* Dave Johnson will be out of office for ten days, which may impact the progress of setting up the new SUN-Blade machines.

Question: Did the participants discuss using a Speech Recognition system for the DARPA demo?

Response: Yes, the participants discussed using a Speech Recognition system for the DARPA demo. They mentioned that the back-end for the demo is mostly ready and that they are working on the front-end. They also discussed the possibility of adding features such as filtering based on meeting type and user ID.

Question: What were the insights <speaker> provided on dealing with the issues related to <topic>?

Response: The meeting does not contain answer to this question.

Question: What did the participants decide to do to address the issues discussed during the meeting?

Response:
* The participants discussed solutions to address the issues brought up during the meeting:
     * To alleviate the disk space issue, they considered getting a new disk rack for the machine room and using external drives per machine to reduce the need for stacking external drives.
     * To address the transcription backlog, they considered using some of the transcribed data from the SmartKom data collection for initial transcription by human transcribers.

Question: Besides the solutions discussed for resolving the disk space problems, were there other potential solutions brought up during the meeting?

Response: There was a discussion about the possibility of hanging external drives off of the SUN-Blade machines to expand the scratch disk space, as these machines have spare drive bays.

Question: What was decided regarding the use of ASR for real-time captioning?

Response: The use of ASR for real-time captioning was not discussed during the meeting.

Question: They also talked about a tool that displays various signals. Were any specifics mentioned about it?

Response: There was a brief discussion about a visualization tool that displays the transcribed text, audio waveform, stylized pitch vector, and X-waves. No specific decisions or plans were made regarding this tool during the meeting.

Question: Could you summarize the key points regarding the agenda related to disk space issues?

Response:
* The participants discussed the issue of disk space, as the need for more disk space is increasing due to the large amount of data being collected.
* They mentioned that one of the solutions could be to get a new disk rack for the machine room.
* They also talked about the possibility of using some of the transcribed data from the SmartKom data collection for initial transcription by human transcribers to help with the transcription backlog.

Question: Could you provide a rundown of the challenges and potential solutions discussed in the meeting regarding disk space limitations?

Response:
* The participants acknowledged the growing need for disk space due to the large amount of data being collected.
* Getting a new disk rack for the machine room and using external drives per machine were proposed as potential solutions to expand disk space.
* The idea of using transcribed data from the SmartKom data collection for initial transcription by human transcribers was also discussed as a way to manage the transcription backlog.


All hooked up. Okay, so now we are here at the functional design meeting. Um hopefully this meeting I'll be doing a little bit less talking than I did last time'cause this is when you get to show us what you've been doing individually. The agenda for the meeting, I put it in the sh shared documents folder. I don't know if that meant that you could see it or not.

Did anyone?

Mm.

No.

No. Oh well. Um I'll try and do that for the next meeting as well so if you check in there, there's a shared project documents folder. Um and it should be in there.

Mm. Um um wi on on a what? Oh project project documents, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Project documents, yeah. So I'll put it in there.

Oh okay, yeah.

Is it best if I send you an email maybe, to let you know it's there?

Yes, I think so.

Yep. I'll do that next time. Um I'll act as secretary for this meeting and just take minutes as we go through, and then I'll send them to you after the meeting. The main the main focus of this meeting is your presentations that you've been preparing during the time, so we'll go through each of you one by one. Um then we need to briefly discuss the new project requirements that were sent to us. I just sent

Yeah, the last minute, yeah,

at the last minute, I'm sorry about that,

yeah.

but we can see how that affects what you were you were doing.

Yeah.

Um and then we need to, by the end of the meeting come to some kind of decision on who our target group's going to be and what the functions of the remote control that's the the main goal is to come up with those two things, target group and functions of the remote control. And we've got forty minutes to do that in. So I would say.

You said uh targ target groups,

yeah?

what does that mean?

As uh who it is that we're going to be trying to sell this thing to,

Um.

Uh okay,'kay.

yeah.

So are.

So we need to yeah, we need to have a fairly defined group that that we want to focus on

Okay.

and then look at the functions um of the dem remote control itself. So with that I think it's best if I hand over to you. Does anyone have a preference for going first?

Alright. I can go first,

You wanna go first?

yeah.

Okay. Hmm.

Okay, so we need to unplug my laptop and plug in yours.

I assume we just pull it out?

Mm.

Right. Um so f from the.

Just before you start, to make it easier, would you three mind emailing me your presentations? Once we you don't have to do it now but when once you go back,

Okay, yeah, afterwards, yeah, okay.

Right sure.

just so that I don't have to scribble everything down.

Uh okay. So n uh with uh with regard to the uh working design of this uh uh remote control uh I've identified um a few basic uh components of the remote and uh se uh from the design, functional design perspective um w I c we can now uh know wha what exactly the components are and how how they work together with each other. So this is the method that uh I'll mostly be following in my um in my uh role. Um the identification of the components, uh and uh since since I'm dealing only with the technical aspects, I would need feedback from the marketing person uh and uh from the user interface person. Uh we'll then integrate this into the product design at a technical level

Hmm.

and uh basically update and come up with a new design, so it's a cyclical process. Okay, so these were the basic findings from today. The last three bullets have been integrated from uh the last minute uh email. Uh I just quickly jotted them down. Um so basically uh the as I told you the identification of how the remote control works and what are the various parts to it uh and what are the different processes um and how the parts uh communicate with each other. Um okay, so e the mee email said that teletext is now outdated, so we need to do away with that functionality of the remote control. Um also uh the remote control should be used only for television, because incorporating other features um makes it more comp complex. And the reason why teletext is outdated because uh of internet and uh the availability of internet over television. How however, our our remote control would only be dealing uh with the the use for television, in order to keep things simple. Um also the management wants that um our design should be unique uh it so it should incorporate um colour and the slogan uh that our company um has it as its standard. Okay, so he he here is a functional overview of the remote control. Um there's basically an energy source at the heart uh which feeds into the chip and the user interface. The user interf interface communicates with the chip, so I'll basic go over to the Okay. So if uh if this is our energy source and this is a cell, uh it communicates uh it feeds energy into the into the chip, which basically finds out h uh how how to do everything. There is a user interface here. So whe when the user presses a button, it feeds into the chip and the chip then generates a response and takes the response to an infrared terminal, um which then so the output of the chip is an infrared bit code, which is then communicated to the remote site, which h has an infrared receiver. Um the there can be uh a bulb here or something to indicate whether the remote is on or communicating. Um so these are the essent so a all the functionality of the remote control, whatever new functions that we need to do, um make the chip more complicated uh and bigger, basically.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. Um so i in my personal preferences um I'm hoping that we can ke keep the design as simple and clear as possible. This would uh help us uh to upgrade our technology at a future point of time. And uh also if we can incorporate uh the latest features in our chip design, so that our um uh remote control does not become outdated soon and it's compatible with mot most uh televisions. That's about it. So anything that you would like to know or.

Okay.

Thanks.

Do you have any um i idea about costs at this point?

No, I don't have any idea about what each component costs.

Br

Um yeah.

Okay.'Cause that's something to consider, I guess, if we're if we're using more advanced technology, it might increase the price.

Yeah. Certainly, yeah. So so tha yeah, we definitely need to operate within our constraints,

Yeah.

but um unfortunately I I do not have any data, so uh I just identified the functional components for that.

That's fine. Are there any more questions, or shall we just skip straight to the next one and then we can discuss all of them together at the end?

I think we need like some general discussion at the end probably.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I think that will do. Okay, so do you want to.

Yeah. Yeah, I think since since we were discussing some um design issues then I I I would like to continue.

Yes, shall shall we pull this up?

okay, yeah.

I think that has to come out of there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm'kay.

Thanks.

Yeah, I thought those last minute things, they're gonna hit you the worst..

Oh i Okay, I hope wait. Should it just.

I it'll take some time.

It ta takes a little Oh, and have you.

There's just nothing.

you need to then also press on yours, function F_ eight,

Oh right, right, right, um.

so the blue function key at the bottom and F_ eight.

Okay. Nothin

Oh, there it is, yeah.

okay, something is coming up.

Now it's coming,

It'll come up, it um uh no signal.

computer no signal.

No signal? Why?

Maybe again?

Yeah yeah, it says something now,

Oh. My my computer went blank now.

adjusting.

Okay, adjusting.

Adjusting. But I don't see anything

Okay.

There we go, there we go.

I don't see anything on my computer now.

Oh, that's strange.

Oh, if you press if you press function and that again

This is the problem, but.

there's there's usually three modes, one where it's only here, one where it's only there, and one where it's both.

Okay.

Um.

And one more time.

Okay, so one more time.

Uh now it's okay. No? No.

Mm.

Should yeah just wait for a moment, adjusting.

Oh okay.

Okay.

Okay, that's fine, that's good. Okay, let's start from the beginning. So I'm going to speak about technical functions design uh just like some some first issues that came up. Um'kay, so the method I was um adopting at this point, it's not um for the for the whole um period of the um all the project but it's just at th at this very moment.

Mm-hmm.

Um uh my method was um to look at um other um remote controls, uh so mostly just by searching on the web and to see what um functionality they used. And then um after having got this inspiration and having compared what I found on the web um just to think about what the de what the user really needs and what um what the user might desire as additional uh functionalities. And yeah, and then just to um put the main function of the remote control in in words.

Mm-hmm.

Um so the findings uh were um that the main function of the remote control is is just sending messages to the television set, so this quite straightforward. And uh w some of the main functions would be switching on, switching off, uh then the user would like to switch the channel um for example just m changing to the next channel to to flip through all all of the possible channels, or then mm uh the other possibility would be that um she might just want to choose one particular channel, so we would need the numbers. And and also the volume is very important. Um um I als

Sorry, cou could you go back for a second?

okay.

Uh switching on off channel, uh volume, okay, that's great.

'Kay. Um um among the findings I found that m m most of the curr mm presently available remote controls also include other mm functionalities um in their design, like operating a V_C_R_, but they don't seem to be able to deal with D_V_D_ players, but then there are surely there are many other functionali functions that could possibly be added to them, but according to the last minute update um actually um we do not want to have all this complicated functions added to our design.

Mm-hmm.

So my personal preferences would be uh to keep the mm the whole remote control small um just like the physical size. And then it must be easy to use, so it must follow some conventions um like whereabouts you find the on off button and maybe the colour tends to be red or something. Um then yeah, the must-have buttons would be on off and then the channel numbers and then um the one that allows us to go to the next or the previous channel, and then volume has to be there. But then um other functionalities um could be just uh there could be a menu button and you could change things on the screen then, um for example brightness and mm similar functions could be just um done through the menu. And yeah, the last question I had about whether we wanted to incorporate n uh more functionalities, the answer was already no because of the last minute update.

Mm-hmm.

So at the for the time being that's uh that's all.

Yeah.

If you have questions.

If I mean that was the the directive that came through from management, but if we had a a decent case for that we really think it's important to include video and D_V_D_, I could get back to them and see. It's w it's just whether it's worth arguing about.

Yeah, and also it's it's um other question is uh because there are so many different And there are so many different things that could possibly be included

Mm-hmm.

because besides video and D_V_D_ there are the mm um video C_D_s and whatever, so it might be problematic to to choose between all these possible things.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Are there any questions for clarification of Maarika before we go on to the next one?

So in the u user interface requirements uh uh uh we we have been able to identify what are the basic buttons that we do want. Um but um so so at this stage, uh how we go about implementing those button we will not identify or I mean in we can completely do away with buttons and uh have some kind of a fancy user interface or something like that. But uh is is there any uh uh any thoughts on that?

Um well, I think the buttons are still mm kind of the most um easy for the user to use,

Right.

I mean um what other options would you have? A little screen or something, but this would be really kind of I think a lot of learning for the user

Yeah, and it'll make the costs yeah.

and and I mean the user just wants to get um get a result um quickly, not to spend time in like um giving several orders um I dunno.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

I think I th I would I would think the put the buttons, but if if you have other mm proposals um.

Uh I think the co costs will also play a big role when we come to know about them.

Mm.

So well we can probably wait until t we have more knowledge on that.

Mm.

Yeah.

Uh i if the if the costs allow, we can have like an L_C_D_ display

Yeah.

and uh with um because we do want something fancy and fashionable as well. So yeah? Cool.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Sure, we can discuss that maybe after the next one.

Cool. Do you wanna give me the little cable thing?

Do you want to yeah.

Uh am I going in the right direction?

Yeah.

No. Wait.

Oh, I'm getting hungry..

Okay, here it comes. Okay, here you are.

Cool. Ah, that's why it won't meet. Okay, cool.

You set?

Yep, cool. Okay, functional requirements.

Uh we need to do the function key thing so that it comes up on here.

Alright, yeah.

Hello.

try to press.

Is it plugged in prop

oh, okay,

It's working.

it's working?

yep.

Okay.

Cool, okay.

Excellent.

So what I have, wh where I've got my information from is a survey where the usability lab um observed remote control use with um a hundred subjects and then they gave them a questionnaire. Um so it was all about, you know, how people feel about the look and feel of the remote control, you know. What's the most annoying things about remote controls and um the possibility of speech recognition and L_C_D_ screens in remote control. Not that they actually gave me any answers on the L_C_D_ screens, so I should have taken that bit out, but anyway.

Um okay, so. What they found is that people don't like how current remote controls are, so you know, definitely you should be looking at something quite different. Um seventy five percent of users find most remote controls ugly. Uh the other twenty five percent have no fashion sense. Uh eighty percent of users would spend more to get um you know, a nice looking remote control.

Um current remote controls, they don't match the user behaviour well, as you'll see on the next slide. Um I dunno what zapping is, but.

It's um switching between channels, sort of randomly going through.

Oh, right. But you have that little thing that comes up at the bottom and tells you what's on. Um okay, fifty percent of users say they only use ten percent of the buttons,

Mm.

so that's going back to what, you know, we were saying earlier about, you know, do you need all the buttons on the remote control,

Right.

they just make it look ugly.

Mm.

Okay? Cool. Um so this is my little graph thing.

Ooh, that's a bit difficult to see.

Mm k

If you explain it to us it'll be fine.

Okay, well, I can send it to all of you. What it is is um it's cones,

Yeah.

'cause I thought they'd be more exciting. Um but.

I liked the, I liked the litt

ooh where's it go?

ooh come back.

Back. Oh.

No.

Oh yes, cool. Okay, I'm gonna stop playing with the little pointy thing.

Mm-hmm.

Um okay, so like what it shows is how much things are used relatively and what you can clearly see from that is the thing that's used most is the channel selection.

Okay.

What you can't see is volume selection, it's a little bit higher than all the others.

Mm-hmm, that's the next one along, yeah?.

Yeah, so what the graph shows is that, you know, power, channel selection and volume selection are important, and the rest of them, you know, nobody really uses and so that's the the numbers along the top represent their like um their importance, you know,

Mm-hmm.

so on a scale of one to ten, how important is that

Mm-hmm.

and, you know, channel selection and volume selection are absolutely essential, and the power, well it's not quite so essential, apparently, although I don't understand how it couldn't be,

um and everything else, I think, you know, you can forget about having those buttons on the remote control,'cause they're just not needed, and they're not used. Okay.

Mm-hmm.

This is the bit that the email messed up for me and that's what I was fiddling about with at the beginning of the thing. Okay, cool. So um okay, so this is what people find annoying about remote controls. Uh that they get lost, that the uh you know, they're not intuitive and that they're bad for repetitive strain injury.

Mm-hmm.

I think if you're watching enough T_V_ to get repetitive strain injury from um you know, watching T_V_, then that's the least of your problems,

The remote control..

but you know, it's up there.

Mm.

Um that yeah. Okay, so um I mean the the R_S_I_ thing would be that, like when you have the computer keyboards and you keep your wrists up would be something that encourages.

Right.

you want something with an ergonomic t design that encourages good use of the remote control and you know, not straining your wrists watching T_V_.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm..

Hmm.

Yes. Okay, cool. Right, um sorry this is pink because I was copying and pasting the table, and I didn't have time to white it out again.

That's alright.

Um okay, but that shows how people whether they would pay more for voice recognition software. So you can see from that that, you know, younger people to the age of thirty five are quite likely to pay quite a lot more f well quite are quite likely to pay more for voice recognition software, whereas as people get older, they're a bit more sceptical about it and they're less willing to to try it. Um so clearly voice recognition is something to think about, but um you know I d I do wonder how well that would work given that a T_V_, you know, tends to be people talking and um, you know, how are you going to stop it from just flipping channels whilst watching T_V_.

Mm.

Right.

Um okay? Cool. Um okay, so these are my personal preferences. So you have sleek, stylish, sophisticated, you know, so something that's, you know, a bit cool. Um you know, functional, so it's useful, but minimalist. Um there's a there's an important thing that, you know, people use when, you know, when you're filling up your home, you know, a lot of people fill up their home with bits of crap, basically, you know, and you've got all this stuff, and you're just like, what the hell is that, who is ever gonna use it? You know, so things should either be functional or beautiful or preferably both, so I think we need to aim for both.

Mm. Mm.

Um okay, then a long battery life, like you were talking about earlier and um, you know, I was thinking that solar power would be quite cool because, you know, your remote control just sits there, and you could just sit it in the sunshine and save the environment a bit.

Um and then like a locator, so you know, kind of like you have for a mobile phone or.

Mm.

not a mobile phone.

Some kind of a ring,

Keys and things like that,

some.

Yeah, that's it, you know.

yeah. Whistle and it screams at you, yeah.

I know, it's weird. My flatmate and I were talking about this on the way into uni this morning and I was like I need to get one for everything.

So yeah, so maybe something where you clap and then it beeps, something a kind of sound that you don't often hear on the T_V_, you know,

Right.

Mm-hmm.

'cause you don't want your remote control beeping every five minutes,

'cause you you'd then deliberately lose it by throwing it out the window or something.

Hmm.

So okay? Cool. That's me..

Okay, that's great,

That's you, excellent.

Um that's very good,

thanks.

Um.

very interesting.

I'm just gonna tick yes. So, we've got about ten, fifteen minutes to discuss

Mm. I think one of the very interesting things that came up in um uh Ka Kate Cat Cat's uh presentation was um uh this this issue of uh uh like voice recognition being more popular with uh younger people.

Cat's. Ca.

So if we need to have a target group um then uh I think as far as the m motto of our company is concerned, if we want to have something sleek and uh you know, good looking uh we are better off targeting a younger audience then um you know, people who are comparatively elderly. Um.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean that's the thing is that it didn't say in the survey, you know, whether, you know, these are the people that will pay more for a more stylish remote control,

Right.

but I'm assuming, you know, yes.

Right. Bu but but the survey did say that f things like voice recognition are more popular with them,

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

so if you want to put in something stylish, then uh th it'll certainly be more popular with this i ye with the younger people as compared to older people,

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

yeah.

Then again I guess the th where it was most popular was the fifteen to twenty five bracket

Right, and.

and the I don't know how often they're buying televisions.

Right. Mm.

Well, that's when you go to uni, isn't it? So, you know.

Yeah, but you don't have much money, generally.

Yeah. Yeah,

I would've thought it's it's more that twenty five to thirty five, when people are really moving out and they've got their first job and they want their nice toys and.

you share a television or something that yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

But uh still, if if you can go back to that slide and uh, how popular was it?

O oh it's on.

Oh, I've unplugged it.

sorry, we unplugged it.

Oh, oh, okay..

Do you want me to.

Here, let me.

That's alright, if you can just look it up on your computer, wh uh um people between twenty five to thirty five, uh how popular was.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Seventy six point three percent.

so it was sti still still quite popular amongst them.

It was seventy something, yeah, yeah.

So even they are seventy six percent, is that high amount?

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I kn I mean I know what you're saying about the fifteen to twenty five year olds,

Yeah.

but I mean it has been proven that that people of that age group have a higher disposable income because they don't have like I mean, you know, if you're at university, you're paying your rent,

Yeah, they've got no commitments and

but you don't have a mortgage, you don't have a life insurance policy,

Alright.

you don't normally have a car,

usually not a car and all of those things.

yeah, so.

Yeah.

You're still learning to drive actually,

Kids. Yeah.

So you're more likely to b

so that just costs more than a car,

Yeah.

but yeah. Um so I mean like it is an age group to target, really, I think.

Yeah, and if we're if we're talking twenty five Euros as a price, that's not unaffordable, even for young people.

No, I mean that's what, that's like fifteen Pounds? You know, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah this this is not unaffordable,

but the problem is whether people need it, whether they do have a T_V_ to use its full.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I d I don't know many people without a T_V_. We didn't have a T_V_ last year,

But do they.

Yeah.

and everyone thought we were off our heads, you know.

But the T_V_s are often kind of someone's old T_V_ that's blah blah

Common, the students yeah, yeah. The s the stu

and be a bit strange to have a fancy rome remote.

yeah, and the remote control might not yeah,

Mm

it might not even function with the old T_V_.

Bu but even even in the case of twenty five to thirty five it's quite popular, right?

Yeah, I d well we've we've got quite a d decent T_V_.

Mm.

Yeah,

So mm uh are are are.

Yeah.

we're still yeah.

Yeah.

Or w maybe we can just kind of uh uh.

I think I think the fact that, you know, ninety one point two percent of fifteen to twenty five year olds are saying yes, I would pay more for a voice recognition remote control, does say quite a lot really.

Mm.

Yeah.

You know, so I mean that and the disposable income and I don't think it's something to ignore, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah, but at the same time I think maybe we can we can just decide to to have both of these groups as our target,

Yeah.

because actually I mean they're all still re young people.

Is not a massive difference, you know. No, do totally.

Yeah, if we ta if we take fifteen to thirty five,

Yeah.

Mm.

but that then does imply that we should try and incorporate voice recognition.

Yeah.

Um.

Is that gonna have a an implication for the technical specs?

I was having a a general outlook on um m most like sophisticated features, but voice recognition itself I'm not very sure about, because one of the p uh things that Cat pointed out was uh uh how do we go about implementing it? Uh and uh.

Mm-hmm.

You do have it in your mobile phone though, don't you? Because you have like I mean every mobile phone now has like call this person and it calls them.

Yeah.

Yeah. But how frequently do we use it anyway

Yeah.

and um uh h ho how good is it,

Yeah.

you know uh voice recognition softwares are still quite uh.

I don't know.

Yeah. With um but with a T_V_ remote it's gonna be quite limited if we're t saying the main things people want to do is on off channel five,

An

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

S so.

louder,

Right. Okay.

tha that should be relatively simple.

O.

y you'd maybe need a code word. Do you know what I mean?

Right.

So like when you say change, except that's being said quite a lot on T_V_,

Mm.

so maybe like, you know, remote. I mean how often do people say remote on T_V_?

Yeah.

Mm.

Although I only watch Charmed, so really I wouldn't know

but like so you'd just say remote five, you know, remote ten, remote one two nine.

Right. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so it seems like a feasible thing to implement uh for for a limited

Yeah.

Yeah, but maybe if you wanna look into that just to just to check.

yeah.

Um, so if we go for the the fifteen to thirty five age group and then of course we're going to get th anyone who's older than thirty five who wants to look young and hip and trendy and has the money,

Yeah but uh um Yeah, yeah sure, yeah, yeah.

then they'll they'll still go for the same advertising.

Yeah.

I don't think there's a lot of uh voice recognition remote controls.

Yeah, w well now the v the voice recognition if if it works wonderfully w we could possibly do away with all buttons, but I think this is not really the right moment yet, because people are just so used to buttons

Yeah,

and um, yeah it's it's kind of safer, so we we need both,

Mm. W

I think we need both.

What uh.

so the voice recognition would be just an extra, it wouldn't really reduce the size of the remote.

Yeah.

Mm.

Mm.

What wh uh what I was thinking is that there is this uh separation between what the channels are on T_V_ and how they are numbered on the remote control. If we can do with away with that, our product can be really popular uh in the sense that uh a person can say, I want to watch uh I_T_V_ one instead of saying that I want to go onto channel number forty five.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Yeah, so if uh if something like that can be incorporated,.

Yeah, that would be another way to do it.

So that if that was in the the voice recognition, that would be great.

some kind of.

Yeah, but then the code word would be even more important, because I mean Sky advertise on every channel, don't they, you know,

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

so then it would be you'd be watching Charmed, and then the Sky advert would come on and it would change to Sky.

Watch Sky and yeah.

Alright.

Yeah, yeah,

Yeah, that's.

and that would be really annoying..

Right.

Mm-hmm. But that's definitely a possibility.

Mm.

Yeah but m but on the other hand, remote control isn't as close to you you probably might just just uh speak into it

Yeah.

and and the T_V_ would be already further away, so it might not pick up the other things coming from there.

Yeah. Do you not think that defeats the object of having voice recognition on a remote control though?

So that you can yell at it,

Yeah, you know, so you have to have the remote control.

yeah.

It's more like if you lost it and it's down the sofa sometime, you can yell at it and it'll just change it, you can look for it later, yeah.

Yeah. Alright.

Yeah, but then the remote control I think I mean um the idea is kind of it's it's not that it's sitting there on on top of the television, because then you could already yell at the television and you wouldn't you you wouldn't need the remote control, so the remote control is still something you keep n near yourself.

Yeah, yeah, I suppose nearer to you but a b like if you have surround sound then.

Mm yeah and it might become very difficult from a distance for the television to understand what you're saying because of the noise factor for the remote control

Mm. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

being cl I mean it'll it'll mm.

No, but I I I was just defending the the fact why why we want to keep the remote control close to us, a and uh not to yell at it from the distance.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm. So uh wh another thing uh that can be used is that uh there can be a beeper button on the T_V_,

Yeah.

so you can go and press that button and um and the remote control, wherever it is, it'll beep,

Mm-hmm.

so we we can probably come to know where it is.

That's.

Yeah.

but then if you're buying the remote separately,

Okay.

but y you could have something, but i if it was something that you could like stick onto the T_V_ or something,

Oh yeah, yeah.

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

some like a two p if you bought it in a two part pack, so one part attaches to the T_V_.

Okay, yeah, mm-hmm.

Yeah,'cause it's it's quite important that you don't lose the the bit to locate the remote control.

The l

Alright, yeah.

Well that's right, but it solves the problem of having different noises.

Yeah, definitely, yeah.

Yeah. Okay, I think we're gonna have to wrap this up um. But if we go away with that that kind of general um specification in mind that we're looking at fifteen to thirty five year olds, we want it to look simple, but still have the buttons so it's easy to use, but only those key buttons, the major buttons and then one sort of menu one, and then voice recognition included as an option

The major ones, yeah.

Right.

um but that obviously needs a little bit more working out as to whether it's really feasible and some of those problems we were mentioning um..

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

What we have to do now is to go back to our little places, complete our questionnaire and some sort of summarisation, which y you'll get immediately by email. Send me your presentations so that I can use them to make the minutes, and then we've got a lunch break

and after lunch we go back to our own little stations and have thirty minutes more work.

Mm-hmm.

Um I'll put the minutes in that project documents folder, but I'll send you an email when I do it, so that you know.

So where exactly is this i

It should be on your desktop, so on the.

Ah, okay.

yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'll put it I'll put them there as soon as I've written them.

Did you find it?

Yeah, yeah in that one,

It's just yeah, yeah.

right yeah.

Yeah, and email them round.

Oh, so y you want our um PowerPoint presentations in there, hey?

Yeah, that would be great.

Okay.

Oh so so we'll just put them i there,

Oh yeah, put them in there. Yeah,

we we yeah, w we won't even okay.

There you go.

then you don't have to email them.

But is everyone's called functional requirements?

No.

No, they're all called something slightly different. Technical requirements and something something, yeah.

Okay, so that's good.

Yeah.

That's me done.

So, if you put them in there, we'll all be able to see them and refer to them if we need to.

Okay, cool.

Um as to where we're going from here, you're going to look at the components concept.

Right.

Yeah? Whatever that means.

Yeah.

I guess I'll find out..

Yeah.

You'll be looking you'll be looking at the user interface concept,

Uh something conceptual, yeah.

on something conceptual and you're watching trends to see how we go and surely voice recognition'll fall off the map or something that.

um we'll keep keep our options op hmm?

Wha what was it again that I was supposed to look into? Con components, oh.

Components,

Hmm..

yeah.

Sorry, but um the next meeting um are we going to have it um right after lunch or shall we prepare our.

No, we have we have after lunch we have thirty minutes to ourselves to prepare,

To prepare, okay, yeah, that's good.

so that's fine, w before lunch we just have to complete the questionnaire and some sort of summary.

Okay.

Okay? Right on time.

Cool..

Okay, so you can I guess we'll see you for lunch in a sec?.

Okay, see you.

Question: Did the industrial designer use the available data to explain the approximate cost of the remote control?

Response: The industrial designer was unable to provide an approximate cost for the remote control since they lacked the necessary data on the cost of each component.

Question: Can you summarize the discussion on the target age range for the product?

Response: The participants discussed targeting a younger audience, such as fifteen to thirty-five year olds, as they would be more receptive to the sleek and stylish design of the remote control. However, they acknowledged that they may also attract older consumers who want to appear trendy and youthful.

Question: Besides the discussion on the target age range, what other key topics were covered in the meeting?

Response:
Here are the key topics discussed in the meeting:

* The industrial designer presented their findings on the basic components of the remote control and how they work together.
* The user interface specialist shared their insights on the main functions of the remote control and user preferences for its design.
* The marketing specialist presented the results of a survey on remote control usage and consumer preferences.
* The team discussed their personal preferences for the remote control's design and features.
* They decided to target consumers between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, as they are more likely to be attracted to the sleek and stylish design of the remote control.

Question: Why did the marketing specialist believe that a younger audience would be more likely to pay for a remote control with a stylish design?

Response:
* Younger people, according to the survey results, are more likely to spend more money on a remote control with a stylish design.
* Younger consumers, the marketing specialist believes, are more inclined to value and appreciate the aesthetic appeal of a well-designed remote control.

Question: Why did the team have to meet?

Response: The team had to meet to discuss and decide on the functional design of the remote control, including its components, user interface, and target audience.

Question: Apart from the survey on remote control usage, what other methods did the marketing specialist use to gather consumer insights?

Response: The marketing specialist did not mention using methods other than the survey to gather consumer insights.

Question: Can you summarize the key findings from the survey conducted by the marketing specialist?

Response:
Here are the key findings from the survey conducted by the marketing specialist:

* Consumers are dissatisfied with the current designs of remote controls, with 75% finding them aesthetically unpleasing.
* 80% of consumers would be willing to pay more for an attractive remote control.
* The most frequently used buttons on remote controls are channel selection, volume control, and power, while other buttons are rarely used.
* Younger consumers, particularly those between fifteen and thirty-five years old, are more receptive to the idea of voice recognition software in remote controls.

Question: Apart from the user preferences, what other factors did the team consider when finalizing the target age range for the product?

Response: The team considered the survey finding that younger consumers between fifteen and thirty-five years old are more likely to be willing to pay more for a remote control with a stylish design and are also more receptive to voice recognition software. Additionally, they considered the fact that this age group is more likely to be early adopters of new technologies.

Question: Why did the industrial designer acknowledge the need to operate within budget constraints?

Response: The industrial designer acknowledged the need to consider budget constraints because they had limited data on the cost of each component required for the remote control. They recognized the importance of operating within their financial limitations to ensure the product remained feasible.

Question: Can you summarize the main findings from the survey conducted by the marketing specialist?

Response:
Here are the main findings from the survey conducted by the marketing specialist:

* 75% of consumers find current remote control designs aesthetically unappealing.
* 80% of consumers would be willing to pay more for an attractive remote control.
* Channel selection, volume control, and power are the most frequently used buttons, while other buttons are rarely used.
* Younger consumers, particularly those between fifteen and thirty-five years old, are more receptive to the idea of voice recognition software in remote controls.