Supporting Smooth Interruption in a Video Conference by Dynamically Changing Background Music Depending on the Amount of Utterance

Interrupting a speaker at the right moment during a meeting is an advanced skill, and not everyone can do it. It is not a rare case that one person keeps talking for a long time, particularly in a video conference, due to limited bandwidth and latency. In order to solve this problem, this paper presents a proof of concept and a working prototype of DiscussionJockey, an online meeting bot that measures the amount of speech of each meeting participant and provides an acoustic stimulus selected by the measurement. On the basis of a literature review, we hypothesized that the timing of speech can be implicitly manipulated by playing background music (BGM) with specific beats per minute (BPM). We conducted a pilot study using the proposed system and observed it made the utterance rate of participants closer to each other. The result of this pilot study has revealed the potential and challenges of meeting interventions.