Jul 25, 2008

Say Again, Please

Driving while distracted is a major safety issue, because distracted driving results in thousands of accidents a year. In yesterday’s Driving News we reported on the top-line results of a new study that indicates that voice-recognition technology might ease the carnage resulting from distracted driving. Now here are some of the details from that study sponsored by Nuance Automotive:

Dialing a mobile phone, even when it is equipped with a hands-free device, can be a dangerous procedure. While many people might think they are adept at dialing a mobile phone while driving, the study showed that speech input of the name or number improved the ability to maintain the ideal car position by 19 percent compared to manual dialing. Better still, speech input was also approximately 40 percent faster in making a call, reducing the distraction period by the same amount.

With the growing popularity of using a portable music player in the car, the safe use of these devices is of paramount concern. The study found that the average driver is 50 percent more distracted and takes more than twice as long for lane changes when selecting music manually versus being able to simply say the artist and song title via a speech-based interface. Swerving within a single lane was even worse without speech input, with 600 percent higher levels of distraction.

Not surprisingly, using a cumbersome manual interface to enter city, street and street number into a navigation system results in significant safety risks. In contrast to entering information manually, voice destination entry resulted in 1,000 percent or 10 times less swerving while staying in a single lane and 30 percent less distraction while changing lanes.

The study also measured how much drivers moved from the perfect lane position and found that drivers showed significantly less deviation when controlling the tested devices by voice versus manual input -- with speech input resulting in 60 percent less deviation from the ideal when selecting music and 50 percent less when entering a destination. Now if we could just control our children with voice commands. . . .