In the early days, consumption of multimedia content related with audio signals was only possible in a stationary manner. The music player was located at home, with a necessary physical drive. An alternative way for an individual was to attend a live performance at a concert hall or host a private concert at home. To sum up, audio-visual effects were only reserved for a narrow group of recipients. Today, thanks to portable players, vision and sound is at last available for everyone. Finally, thanks to multimedia streaming platforms, every music piece or video, e.g. from one’s favourite artist or band, can be viewed anytime and everywhere. The background or status of an individual is no longer an issue. Each person who is connected to the global network can have access to the same resources. This paper is focused on the consumption of multimedia content using mobile devices. It describes a year to year user case study carried out between 2015 and 2019, and describes the development of current trends related with the expectations of modern users. The goal of this study is to aid policymakers, as well as providers, when it comes to designing and evaluating systems and services.
In recent years the application of computer software to the learning process has been found to be an indisputably effective tool supporting the traditional teaching methods. Particular focus has been put on the application of techniques based on speech and language processing to the second language learning. Most of the commercial self-study programs, however, do not allow for introduction of an individualized learning course by the teacher and to concentrate on segmental features only. The paper discusses the use of speech technology in the training of foreign languages' pronunciation and prosody and defines pedagogical requirements for an effective training with CAPT systems. In this context, steps taken in the development of the intelligent tutoring system AzAR3.0 (German ‘Automat for accent reduction’) in the scope of the Euronounce project (Cylwik et al., 2008) are described with the focus on creation of the linguistic content. In response to the European Union's call for promoting less widely spoken languages, the project focuses on German as a target language for native speakers of Polish, Slovak, Czech, and Russian, and vice versa. The paper presents the design of the speech corpus for the purpose of the tutoring system and the analysis of pronunciation errors. The results of the latter provide information which is important for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) training on the one hand, and for automatic error detection and feedback generation on the other hand. In the end, Pitch Line software for implementation in the prosody visualization and training module of AzAR3.0 tutoring system is described.
In the age of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Web and the Internet have changed significantly the way applications are developed, deployed and used. One of recent trends is modern design of web-applications based on SOA. This process is based on the composition of existing web services into a single scenario from the point of view of a particular user or client. This allows IT companies to shorten the product-time to market process. On the other hand, it raises questions about the quality of the application, trade-offs between quality factors and attributes and measurements of these. Services are usually hosted and executed in an environment managed by its provider that assures the quality attributes such as availability or throughput. Therefore, in this paper an attempt has been made to perform quality measurements towards the creation of efficient, dependable and user-oriented Web applications. First, the process of designing service-based applications is described. Next, metrics for subsequent measurements of efficiency, dependability and usability of distributed applications are presented. These metrics will assess the efforts and trade-offs in a Web-based application development. As examples, we describe a pair of multimedia applications which we have developed in our department and executed in a cluster-based environment. One of them runs in the BeesyCluster middleware and the second one in the Kaskada platform. For these applications we present results of measurements and conclude about relations between quality attributes in the presented application development model. This knowledge can be used to reason about such relations for new similar applications and be used in rapid and quality development of the latter.