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.