Gather
A Speech to Text Work Tool
A Speech to Text Work Tool
A Speech to Text Work Tool
Gather translates the speech around you in real time and provides the tools necessary to take notes, review meetings, and share information with teammates.
Gather translates the speech around you in real time and provides the tools necessary to take notes, review meetings, and share information with teammates.
Gather translates the speech around you in real time and provides the tools necessary to take notes, review meetings, and share information with teammates.
Research, UX, UI, Prototyping, User Testing
Art Center College of Design
With its ever-growing presence in virtual assistance and beyond, how will advancements in speech recognition and localization transform other aspects of our day to day lives? Over 13 weeks I explored how advancements in speech to text transcription may transform the way we record information, resulting in a tablet-based prototype highlighting Gather's key interactions.
How Gather Takes Notes
In order to reduce the speed and cognitive function required to identify and take a note, Gather invites a user to tap on a recently spoken sentence, and then identify it as important through a small selection of emojis. So rather than re-writing an essential sentence or underlining a crucial idea, make note of what's important to you with a couple taps.
Adding Your Team - and Permissions
Gather takes your transcripts and notes and places them within your company's hierarchy and permissions. When creating a meeting, you'll quickly add your teammates so that Gather may understand who is speaking, and who these notes should be available to.
Increasing Note Longevity: Or, how might we maintain the integrity of information as it gets passed throughout a company or team?
All notes that you take in Gather still retain their connection to the meeting they initially came from. That means that any user with permissions to that meeting can, if needed, browse the context that surrounds a particular note. This reduces multi-directional miscommunication.
Why Emojis? And How to Define a Note
How do people typically mark things as important, incomplete, urgent, or all of the above? How does highlighting a physical note translate to your digital device in a way that's not only instant, but easy for you and your teammates to understand?
I found that emojis provide users a degree of freedom and expression that still translates at scale. The particular emojis were chosen after a series of user-tests determined that these 5 had both a high frequency of use, and were poignant enough in communicating ideas like "good", "bad", or "important".
Why Gather? Note Taking is difficult
The massive cognitive demand required to take notes often flies under the radar:
"First, the storage capacity of working memory is limited, and second, working memory functions consist of not just temporary storage, but also the manipulation and/or transformation of what is stored, and the maintenance of temporarily stored information when attention is shifted to performance of other tasks."
‘The role of working memory abilities in lecture note taking’, Bui & Myerson, 2014
This difficulty is even greater for those who have ADHD, which occurs in 5-9% of the United States population (UC Davis Health). So how do we allow for all users to take effective, context-heavy notes while reducing the cognitive load required to do so?
Additional User Journeys, Information Architecture, Wireframes, User Testing, and prototyping process available on request
