Media Player Fast-Forward with Importance-Ranked Audio Metadata
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional media players lack the ability to provide an audio cue for resuming normal playback when advancing media content at higher than normal speed, particularly affecting visually impaired users, as the audio becomes garbled and unintelligible at increased speeds.
Innovation Solution
Appending metadata to media files that ranks important audio segments, allowing a media player to play the most important sentences at normal speed while advancing the media content at higher speeds, using techniques such as speech-to-text, tokenization, and text ranking algorithms to identify and extract key phrases and sentences.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Speed
If audio is advanced at higher than normal speed along with video, then the user can fast forward content, but the audio becomes garbled and unintelligible
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the continuous audio stream into discrete sentence units, each marked with importance rankings. During fast-forward playback, the system selectively plays only high-importance sentences at normal speed while skipping lower-importance portions, thereby maintaining audio intelligibility while enabling rapid content advancement.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies different playback qualities to different portions of the audio content. High-importance sentences are played at normal speed with full intelligibility, while low-importance portions are either skipped or played at accelerated speeds, creating a spatially differentiated playback experience that resolves the contradiction between speed and intelligibility.
2Reliability
If all audio content is played at normal speed, then audio intelligibility is maintained, but the user cannot fast forward through content efficiently
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs preliminary analysis of the audio content before playback, generating importance rankings for each sentence based on speech-to-text conversion and natural language processing. This pre-processing enables the playback system to quickly determine which sentences deserve normal-speed playback during fast-forward operations, eliminating the need to play through all content at normal speed.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies partial action by playing only a subset of sentences (those with high importance rankings) at normal speed during fast-forward operations, rather than playing all audio content. This selective approach maintains sufficient intelligibility for key information while dramatically improving content consumption efficiency.
3Measurement precision
If speech-to-text conversion and text ranking algorithms are applied to all sentences, then accurate importance ranking is achieved, but processing time and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs speech-to-text conversion and importance ranking calculations in advance, during a pre-processing phase that occurs before the actual media playback. The resulting importance rankings are stored as metadata with the media file, allowing the playback system to simply retrieve and use pre-computed rankings during fast-forward operations without performing heavy computational tasks in real-time.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent divides the audio content into sentence-level segments for independent analysis and ranking. This segmentation allows the processing to be performed on smaller, manageable units rather than analyzing the entire audio stream as one large block, reducing the computational burden and enabling parallel processing of multiple sentences simultaneously.
Data Source
AI summary
A media player may receive an instruction to advance the media file content a higher than normal speed. At least a portion of the associated metadata may be accessed to retrieve a location of a group of words determined to be the most important in a portion of the media file content being advanced at the higher than normal speed. Audio content of the group of the most important words may be played at a normal speed while advancing the media file at a higher than normal speed.