In-Car Speech User Interfaces and their Effects on Driving Performance

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 17:23

Ubiquitous computing and speech user interaction are starting to play an increasingly important role in vehicles. Given the large amount of time that people spend behind the wheel, and the availability of computational resources that can now operate inside a vehicle, many companies have been introducing a myriad of mobile services and functionalities for drivers into the consumer market, such as hands-free voice dialing and GPS navigation. Through our work at the University of New Hampshire, ubiquitous computing and speech user interaction now also help law enforcement officers to perform their everyday jobs: our Project54 system, which integrates devices in police cruisers and allows officers to control these devices using a speech user interface, has been deployed in over 1,000 vehicles. However, the effect of these technologies on the driving performance of users has not been adequately addressed in the research literature. A related problem is that of determining how to integrate these technologies so as to reduce the threat of accidents. Ideally, speech interaction should not introduce any impairment to the primary visual and cognitive task of driving. However, in a recent study investigating how characteristics of the speech user interface can affect driving performance, we have found that the accuracy of the recognizer as well as its interaction with the use of the push-to-talk button can significantly affect driving performance. This talk will discuss our work on quantifying the influence of speech user interface characteristics, road conditions and driver psychological state on driving performance, using a state-of-the-art driving simulator, an eye-gaze tracker, and physiological metrics.