Reducing Speech Contention in Web Conferences

In Web conferences, we sometimes cannot recognize when other participants begin speaking. This depresses the participants' motivation and wastes time. We can take turns smoothly in face-to-face communication through the use of non-verbal messages, but this back channel is not available in existing web conference systems. We overcome this problem by proposing a method that senses actions that indicate the desire to speak and alerts the other participants accordingly. An evaluation of a prototype indicates that it realizes smoother turn-taking than is possible in regular web conference systems.