Evaluation of In-Car SDS Notification Concepts for Incoming Proactive Events.

Due to the mobile Internet revolution, people communicate increasingly via social networks and instant messaging applications using their smartphones. In order to stay “always connected” they even use their smartphone while driving their car which puts the driver safety at risk. In order to reduce driver distraction an intuitive speech interface which provides the driver with proactively incoming events needs to be developed. Before developing a new speech dialog system developers have to examine what the user’s preferred interaction style is. This paper reports from a recent driving simulation study in which several speech-based proactive notification concepts for incoming events in different contextual situations are evaluated. 4 different speech dialog and 2 graphical user interface concepts, one including an avatar, were designed and evaluated on usability and driving performance. The results show that there are significant differences when comparing the speech dialog concepts. Informing the user verbally achieves the best result concerning usability. Earcons are perceived to be the least distractive. The presence of an avatar was not accepted by the participants and led to an impaired steering performance.