Safe and Easy to Use Voice Interfaces for Automotive
Simplicity is the key to safe, intuitive user interfaces for the automotive environment, and speech is a logical input modality for a telematics system because it allows for hands-on-the-wheel, eyes-on-the-road interaction. However, many state-of-the art automotive speech interfaces may be unsafe because their complex, multi-state, often system-paced spoken dialogs impose a high cognitive load on the user, and can therefore interfere with the primary task of driving. Effective speech interfaces should instead employ flatter interaction models with a minimum of states to remember, and should use physical controls rather than speech to carry out simple commands.
Background & Objective: The skyrocketing amount of information and content available on both standalone and Internet-enabled automotive devices presents a challenge. That is: how to provide users with the information and content they desire in a seamless, intuitive fashion, while at the same time minimizing driver distraction. MERL plans to develop and test new interfaces that will meet this challenge.
Technical Discussion: One such interface paradigm is "Speech In, List Out" (SILO), wherein a user searches a content database (for example, points of interest in a navigation system or music on a connected portable player) using simple, single-shot spoken queries, rather than entering into a confusing, turn-taking dialog with the system. SILO retrieval may be combined with concise, consistent speech commands and/or well-placed physical controls to create a driving experience that affords access to the latest information and content, while at the same time keeping both driver and passengers safe.
Other important work includes the extension of SILO's enabling technology, SpokenQuery, to handle the combination of query and command components within a single utterance. Also, several members of the group collaborated on a chapter entitled "Speech Based UI Design for the Automobile" for the volume _Handbook of Research on User Interface Design and Evaluation for Mobile Technology_ (ed. Joanna Lumsden), to be published in late 2007 by Idea Group Inc.
Outside Collaborations: UMass-Amherst HPL (Don Fisher et al.)
Future Direction: Future work may involve prototyping complete automotive interfaces, incorporating both visual, voice, and haptic input and/or output. Additional usability and driver safety studies should be carried out in concert with this.
Contacts:
Garrett Weinberg
Bret Harsham
| Technical Reports: | |
| A Comparison Between Spoken Queries and Menu-based Interfaces for In-Car Digital Music Selection | |
| SpokenQuery: An Alternate Approach to Choosing Items with Speech | |
| A Speech-In List-Out Approach to Spoken User Interfaces | |
| The MERL SpokenQuery Information Retrieval System - A System for Retrieving Pertinent Documents from a Spoken Query | |
Technology Areas:
Multimedia
Spoken Language Interfaces
Modification Date: September 12, 2007
