It is Okay to be Distracted: How Real-time Transcriptions Facilitate Online Meeting with Distraction

Online meetings are indispensable in collaborative remote work environments, but they are vulnerable to distractions due to their distributed and location-agnostic nature. While distraction often leads to a decrease in online meeting quality due to loss of engagement and context, natural multitasking has positive tradeoff effects, such as increased productivity within a given time unit. In this study, we investigate the impact of real-time transcriptions (i.e., full-transcripts, summaries, and keywords) as a solution to help facilitate online meetings during distracting moments while still preserving multitasking behaviors. Through two rounds of controlled user studies, we qualitatively and quantitatively show that people can better catch up with the meeting flow and feel less interfered with when using real-time transcriptions. The benefits of real-time transcriptions were more pronounced after distracting activities. Furthermore, we reveal additional impacts of real-time transcriptions (e.g., supporting recalling contents) and suggest design implications for future online meeting platforms where these could be adaptively provided to users with different purposes.