User concepts for in-car speech dialogue systems and their integration into a multimodal human-machine interface
Sandra Mann · OPUS Publication Server of the University of Stuttgart (University of Stuttgart) · 2010
In the automotive environment an increasing number of assisting systems as well as luxury features has found its way into vehicles over the past years: radio, CD, MP3, DVD, on-board address book, organisers, mobile phones, PDAs, destination input, selecting points of interest etc. The variety of on-board electronic devices and its extensive functions are likely to distract drivers from pursuing the primary driving task. Speech as a means of human-machine interaction should offer the user hands-free operation while driving to concentrate on the traffic situation rather than using various displays and buttons. However, parts of in-car dialogue systems tend to have lost transparency due to the increased functionality. Although people have accepted the innovative character of speech as interaction means and are generally motivated to use it, they fairly often get frustrated when operating an in-car speech dialogue system. Interaction is considered difficult and cumbersome and the first hurdle for getting acquainted with the system is high. It is often the conceptual design as opposed to technical mistakes that is regarded as the major obstacle for efficient and user-friendly interaction. The aim of this approach therefore was to develop concepts that facilitate human-machine interaction. The concepts range from general design guidelines to accessing large databases within applications such as audio, navigation and address book. Current methods of navigating data once were focused on very small numbers of music titles and address book entries and are therefore no longer adequate. To establish general requirements for the user interface, human communication was analysed to extract principles crucial for human-machine interaction. Also, various user studies were carried out to find out how users behave in human-computer interaction and where usability problems occur. The user's lacking recollection of audio, navigation and address book data was particularly taken into account and integrated into the concepts. The concepts bring back transparency into the multitude of technical devices and large amounts of data, while simultaneously ensuring consistency within and across modalities.