TalkLess: Blending Extractive and Abstractive Speech Summarization for Editing Speech to Preserve Content and Style

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Benharrak, Karim, Peng, Puyuan, Pavel, Amy
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866913982182326272
author Benharrak, Karim
Peng, Puyuan
Pavel, Amy
author_facet Benharrak, Karim
Peng, Puyuan
Pavel, Amy
contents Millions of people listen to podcasts, audio stories, and lectures, but editing speech remains tedious and time-consuming. Creators remove unnecessary words, cut tangential discussions, and even re-record speech to make recordings concise and engaging. Prior work automatically summarized speech by removing full sentences (extraction), but rigid extraction limits expressivity. AI tools can summarize then re-synthesize speech (abstraction), but abstraction strips the speaker's style. We present TalkLess, a system that flexibly combines extraction and abstraction to condense speech while preserving its content and style. To edit speech, TalkLess first generates possible transcript edits, selects edits to maximize compression, coverage, and audio quality, then uses a speech editing model to translate transcript edits into audio edits. TalkLess's interface provides creators control over automated edits by separating low-level wording edits (via the compression pane) from major content edits (via the outline pane). TalkLess achieves higher coverage and removes more speech errors than a state-of-the-art extractive approach. A comparison study (N=12) showed that TalkLess significantly decreased cognitive load and editing effort in speech editing. We further demonstrate TalkLess's potential in an exploratory study (N=3) where creators edited their own speech.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_15202
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TalkLess: Blending Extractive and Abstractive Speech Summarization for Editing Speech to Preserve Content and Style
Benharrak, Karim
Peng, Puyuan
Pavel, Amy
Human-Computer Interaction
Millions of people listen to podcasts, audio stories, and lectures, but editing speech remains tedious and time-consuming. Creators remove unnecessary words, cut tangential discussions, and even re-record speech to make recordings concise and engaging. Prior work automatically summarized speech by removing full sentences (extraction), but rigid extraction limits expressivity. AI tools can summarize then re-synthesize speech (abstraction), but abstraction strips the speaker's style. We present TalkLess, a system that flexibly combines extraction and abstraction to condense speech while preserving its content and style. To edit speech, TalkLess first generates possible transcript edits, selects edits to maximize compression, coverage, and audio quality, then uses a speech editing model to translate transcript edits into audio edits. TalkLess's interface provides creators control over automated edits by separating low-level wording edits (via the compression pane) from major content edits (via the outline pane). TalkLess achieves higher coverage and removes more speech errors than a state-of-the-art extractive approach. A comparison study (N=12) showed that TalkLess significantly decreased cognitive load and editing effort in speech editing. We further demonstrate TalkLess's potential in an exploratory study (N=3) where creators edited their own speech.
title TalkLess: Blending Extractive and Abstractive Speech Summarization for Editing Speech to Preserve Content and Style
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15202