Podcasts as a media format have been increasing popular in recent years. The ease of access to this format have contributed for its success story. However, the creation of Podcasts requires specific hardware and software for recording and editing it. Some platforms have emerged with the proposal to ease this creation process, namely by introducing Text-to-Speech (TTS) technologies removing the need for capturing and editing voice, reducing the effort necessary for producing this format, yet no platform allows the use of TTS in Portuguese of Portugal while retaining the scope of “podcast creation platform”. Taking these limitations in mind we present the proposal of an all-in-one Podcast Creation platform with the availability of TTS Technology in Portuguese of Portugal. The paper describes the usability testing (UX) of the platform using 3 methodologies being: Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM), System Usability Scale (SUS) and Attrakdiff. with promising results regarding its usability and desirability.

The increase in the consumption of digital formats has, in many cases, been a penalty for traditional media companies. In the adaptation to digital, the transformation of written news into audio formats, that guarantee spatio-temporal flexibility in its consumption, is one of the differentiating options. Artificial intelligence tools can help accelerate and automate the digitalization processes. It is, therefore, the objective of this paper to evaluate the integration of Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology in the process of creating news podcasts. The study comprised two surveys. The first corresponding to the validation of TTS services in Portuguese from Portugal, and the second for the validation of three models of news podcasts containing human voice, synthesized voice via TTS, and a hybrid model with TTS voice and human voice. The results point to a general acceptance of the integration of voices generated by TTS in news podcasts without prejudice to the consumer experience.

Cultural places like museums have been looking for means to enrich the visitor experience during and after the visit. This paper reports on a proposal to contribute to this field presenting a system that automatically creates personalized memory videos of the visit, by identifying the paths of visitors in cultural spaces. The MixMyVisit project combines low-cost devices with NFC technology, allowing a simple way for identifying visitors’ paths, a bot for interaction with the visitor through a textual chat implemented in a social network, the ability for the visitor to share its own captured contents (photos or videos), a server-side video engine supported by ffmpeg components and an online responsive video editor. The features and main technical developments are presented on the paper. The results of an evaluation carried by two experts provide positive insights towards such a system and the team expects to get a final validation in a field trial to be carried out.

In recent years, artists and communities have expressed the desire to work with tools that facilitate co-creation and allow distributed community performances. These performances can be spread over several physical stages, connecting them on real-time towards a single experience with the audience distributed along them. This enables a wider remote audience consuming the performance through their own devices, and even grants the participation of remote users in the show. In this paper we introduce the Co-creation Stage, a web-based tool that allows managing heterogeneous content sources, with a particular focus on live and on-demand media, across several distributed devices. The Co-creation Stage is part of the toolset developed in the Traction H2020 project which enables community performing art shows, where professional artists and non-professional participants perform together from different stages and locations. Here we present the design process, the architecture and the main functionalities of the tool as well as the results of the first user evaluation with Opera houses and artists.

The growing use of second-screen devices stresses the importance of finding a balance between engagement, distraction, and disturbance of its users, while simultaneously watching television. In this framework, this article reports on a study designed to analyze the efficiency, impact, and interference of different notification strategies aiming to identify the best approach to be used when an alert is needed in second-screen scenarios.A prototype able to deliver synchronized information related with TV content, with intervals of 10, 30 and 60 s, followed by individual or combined notifications (e.g., audio, visual, and haptic—on the tablet and visual—on the TV) was developed. A laboratory adapted to replicate a living room was set up and a test that involved watching three segments of a 20-min clip while using the prototype was carried with 30 participants, under a cognitive walk-through protocol.Quantitative and qualitative results show that receiving notifications while watching TV is effective in alerting users about new information, despite its inherent cognitive disturbance for the TV viewing experience. It was also possible to highlight that in an HCI perspective, the most suitable strategy for integrating notifications (considering type and cadence) should be based on a combination of a visual notification (displayed only on the TV screen) along with a haptic notification (vibration on the tablet); spaced by an interval of at least 30 s.