Speakr: auditory skimming and scrolling

The widespread use of portable devices has led to the resurgence of speech interfaces. There is a crucial difference between the visual and auditory presentation of text. If text is presented visually, the user can skim and scroll through the content to locate relevant information. Audio output is usually presented sequentially with media player controls. For synthesized text a much more precise control is required. Actually the ability to skim and scroll through speech or auditory output will be crucial to the deployment speech output. Speakr is a speech synthesis system which permits different levels of skimming in speech outputs produced using speech synthesis. Speakr exploits the availability of the underlying text representation. Different aspects of the text representation - typographic conventions, markups, syntax, semantics, etc. - are used to achieve skim and scroll effects.