The Overheard Text Map: A Voice Communication System that Displays Word Clouds of a Conversation in a Virtual Room to Participants Outside the Room

This paper developed a voice communication system, the Overheard Text Map (OTM), which displays the frequent words of a conversation in a virtual space. Participants who engage in voice communication using the OTM can create conversation rooms. They may move freely among the rooms, if they mutually agree to do so, holding internal departmental meetings, group discussions at seminars, poster sessions, and informal gatherings, for example. The OTM displays frequent words in the current conversation to the participants outside the corresponding room using a word cloud. The word cloud selects multiple words with a high frequency of occurrence in the text data of conversations and displays them in a size corresponding to their frequency. In this way, participants can obtain an overview of the conversation in the room without joining it. Therefore, it is expected that the participants will find it easier to choose and join a room with conversations that match what they want to talk about. In the experiment, participants watched the word clouds and chose an appropriate room where participants were having a conversation that matched what they wanted to talk about. The results showed that word clouds created based on discussions are useful for people who want to join an appropriate conversation room.