The SmartPhone: Interactive Group Audio with Complementary Symbolic Control

The SmartPhone provides a medium for distributed interactive group dialog by complementing an audio channel with a symbolic control channel. The control channel conveys information used for speaker identification, feedback, and turn taking. While these are conveyed visually in face-to-face meetings, their absence in purely audio systems limits the interactivity possible with such systems. Conveying control information symbolically avoids the bandwidth and other costs of video, while allowing novel modes of operation not possible in face-to-face meetings, e.g. anonymous feedback, prioritised turn taking and asynchronous skipping through meetings. The user interface to the control information is predominantly graphical.