Guiding Preferred Driving Style Using Voice in Autonomous Vehicles: An On-Road Wizard-of-Oz Study

Matching the autonomous vehicle’s (AV) driving style to its user’s preference is core to a satisfactory user experience. The recent HCI community has undertaken a significant amount of research to understand user-preferred driving styles in AVs. Due to its multifaceted nature, understanding these driving preferences is difficult unless users take roles in an adaptive system and share their needs explicitly. However, there is a lack of a proper channel for users to express their driving-style needs in AVs. To bridge this gap, we suggest a user’s preferred driving-style guidance using voice as a novel input channel for human-centric AV control. We conducted a Wizard-of-Oz driving study on real roads, aiming to explore the guiding experience with the AV agent to reflect their driving-style preferences. This paper presents the value of driving-style guidance along with its burden to users, and concludes with its implications in designing a better AV-guiding experience.