Talk to the Hand (Or Dashboard)

Like most of us who have commuted in rush-hour traffic, I'm never amazed at what I'll see next. Shaving, applying make-up, talking on cell phones. Ha! Child's play. The real pros can handle reading the morning paper at 70 mph, changing the baby's diapers and lanes at the same time, or eating a bowl of breakfast cereal while driving and talking on a cell phone. Now that takes some skill or stupidity, depending on your point of view.

It's no surprise that a recent study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute concluded that drivers paying attention to everything but driving are three times more likely to be involved in crashes as more attentive motorists. And according to the study, cell phone use is the most common distraction for drivers.

"All of these activities are much more dangerous than we thought before," Charlie Klauer, a senior research associate at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, was quoted as saying by The Associated Press. "But also we're very concerned about the fact that not only are we drinking our coffee and we're disciplining our children and we're eating sandwiches in the car, but the proliferation of technologies in the vehicle have just exacerbated the amount of time that drivers are distracted," Klauer said.

One solution to keeping driver's hands on the wheel and eyes on the road is voice-controlled technology.

"Speech recognition is at the beginning of a tidal wave in cars," says Pioneer Electronics' Karen Rubin. "Drivers can now enter destinations, search for points of interest, and access their music on the built-in hard drive using their voices."

Pioneer's solution is its AVIC-Z1 system, which features a voice recognition system for navigation destination entry and audio track search, together with text-to-speech voice guidance of street names. The AVIC-Z1 is built around IBM's Embedded ViaVoice text-to-speech (TTS) engine and phonetic data from geographic content supplier Tele Atlas, which can increase the quality of speech technology used in map-based applications by providing more precise pronunciations of location and directional information. For example, the system will pronounce, "turn right onto La Jolla Street" with an "H" sound for the "J" in Jolla and "Y" sound for the double "L," helping to greatly improve its assistance ability.

The AVIC-Z1's voice recognition has a large vocabulary, letting it understand a broad array of spoken commands. Drivers can search for destinations by saying a command, like "go to Los Angeles International Airport," without having to specify the action, such as "Points of Interest Search," or category of the destination, such as "airport." Full address searches can also be done by naming the city, street, and house number allowing drivers to use alternative words for the same command, such as "go to" or "search," instead of "destination."

Using a 30-GB hard drive, the AVIC-Z1 uses the Tele Atlas map database to offer dynamic route guidance, detailed mapping and valuable road information that crosses the entire U.S. and Canada. In some areas of the country, navigation includes lane information, letting the driver know specifically which lane to be in for the next turn. Almost 11 million points of interest help make it easy to find gas stations, restaurants, stores, and other business listings.

Voice commands for audio-visual sources and other attachments like Bluetooth wireless technology-enabled cell phones are just as easy. Drivers can directly access the built-in music library, which is 10 GB of the hard drive allocated to ripping and storing a personalized music collection of their CDs. Contents of the music library can be accessed by saying the artist name, song title, genre, or album title. Similarly, customers can wirelessly access their Bluetooth-enabled phones to place a phone call, and to speak hands free through the built-in microphone on the AVIC-Z1 and speakers on the vehicle.

Of course, the skeptics among us might say, "Great--even more distractions." I say "Thank goodness for telecommuting."

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:44 AM  Permalink