MeetScript: Designing Transcript-based Interactions to Support Active Participation in Group Video Meetings

TL;DR

MeetScript introduces an interactive transcript system for video meetings that enhances active participation, reduces cognitive load, and improves recollection of discussions through real-time collaborative annotations and visualization.

Contribution

This paper presents MeetScript, a novel transcript-based interaction system that supports active participation and information retention in video meetings, a significant advancement over existing solutions.

Findings

MeetScript significantly increased non-verbal participation.

Participants better recalled team decisions with MeetScript.

Users appreciated the ease of navigating and contextualizing transcripts.

Abstract

While videoconferencing is prevalent, concurrent participation channels are limited. People experience challenges keeping up with the discussion, and misunderstanding frequently occurs. Through a formative study, we probed into the design space of providing real-time transcripts as an extra communication space for video meeting attendees. We then present MeetScript, a system that provides parallel participation channels through real-time interactive transcripts. MeetScript visualizes the discussion through a chat-alike interface and allows meeting attendees to make real-time collaborative annotations. Over time, MeetScript gradually hides extraneous content to retain the most essential information on the transcript, with the goal of reducing the cognitive load required on users to process the information in real time. In an experiment with 80 users in 22 teams, we compared MeetScript with two baseline conditions where participants used Zoom alone (business-as-usual), or Zoom with an adds-on transcription service (Otter.ai). We found that MeetScript significantly enhanced people's non-verbal participation and recollection of their teams' decision-making processes compared to the baselines. Users liked that MeetScript allowed them to easily navigate the transcript and contextualize feedback and new ideas with existing ones.