The January/February 2008 issue of Speech Technology Magazine has an article on Project54. The primary subject is the Project54 speech user interface. It’s a fun read.
The article includes interesting quotes from Project54′s Bill Lenharth and from Lieutenant Mark Liebl of the New Hampshire State Police (NHSP). Mark has been involved in formulating requirements for the Project54 system and testing our designs since the inception of the project. He has also helped deploy the system in over 300 NHSP cruisers.
Toward the end, the article mentions two areas of our ongoing research. One of them is the investigation of how various characteristics of in-car speech user interfaces (SUIs) influence driving performance. We’ve been conducting experiments with human participants in order to evaluate the influence of individual SUI characteristics on driving performance. E.g. we have investigated the relationship between speech recognition accuracy of in-car user interfaces and driving performance. A small correction to the article: we do not conduct our experiments using Project54-equipped cars – the experiments use our driving simulator.
The second research topic the article mentions is our investigation of the effects of in-car navigation devices on driving performance. This is collaborative work with Tim Paek of Microsoft Research. One question we hope to answer is when drivers feel compelled to look at the GUI of a navigation device, even if they have speech output from the device. This is an important question since taking your eyes off the road while driving is potentially hazardous. Note that one of my graduate students, Jon Oppelaar, has integrated Microsoft’s MapPoint into Project54. Mark Liebl is testing Jon’s software on the road (this is the “voice-enabled GPS unit” in the article).
Andrew Kun