Meeting participants can experience cognitive overload when they need both to verbally contribute to ongoing discussion while simultaneously creating notes to promote later recall of decisions made during the meeting. We designed two novel cuing tools to reduce the cognitive load associated with note-taking, thus improving verbal contributions in meetings. The tools combine real-time automatic speech recognition ASR with lightweight annotation to transform note-taking into a low overhead markup process. To create lightweight notes, users do not generate the notes' content themselves. Instead they simply highlight important phrases in a real-time ASR transcript Highlighter tool, or press a button to indicate when they heard something important Hotspots tool. We evaluated these markup tools against a traditional pen-and-paper baseline with 26 users. Hotspots was highly successful: compared with handwritten notes, it increased participants' conversational contributions and reduced their perception of overload in the meeting, while improving recall of the meeting two months later. Highlighter also improved recall without compromising conversational contributions, although users found it more demanding.

Markup as you talk