Studying natural user interfaces for smart video annotation towards ubiquitous environments

Creativity and inspiration for problem-solving are critical skills in a group-based learning environment. Communication procedures have seen continuous adjustments over the years, with increased multimedia elements usage like videos to provide superior audience impact. Annotations are a valuable approach for remembering, reflecting, reasoning, and sharing thoughts on the learning process. However, it is hard to control playback flow and add potential notes during video presentations, such as in a classroom context. Teachers often need to move around the classroom to interact with the students, which leads to situations where they are physically far from the computer. Therefore, we developed a multimodal web video annotation tool that combines a voice interaction module with manual annotation capabilities for more intelligent natural interactions towards ubiquitous environments. We observed current video annotation practices and created a new set of principles to guide our research work. Natural language enables users to express their intended actions while interacting with the web video player for annotation purposes. We have developed a customized set of natural language expressions that map the user speech to specific software operations through studying and integrating new artificial intelligence techniques. Finally, the paper presents positive results gathered from a user study conducted to evaluate our solution.