Long Text Reading in a Car

We present here the results of a study focused on text reading in a car. The purpose of this work is to explore how machine synthesized reading is perceived by users. Are the users willing to tolerate deficiencies of machine synthesized speech and trade it off for more current content? What is the impact of listening to it on driver’s distraction? How do the answers to the questions above differ for various types of text content? Those are the questions we try to answer in the presented study. We conducted the study with 12 participants, each facing three types of tasks. The tasks differed in the length and structure of the presented text. Reading out a fable represented an unstructured pleasure reading text. The news represented more structured short texts. Browsing a car manual was an example of working with structured text where the user looks for particular information without much focusing on surrounding content. The results indicate relatively good user acceptance for the presented tasks. Distraction of the driver was related to the amount of interaction with the system. Users opted for controlling the system by buttons on the steering wheel and made little use of the system’s display.

[1]  Albrecht Schmidt,et al.  Automotive user interfaces and interactive applications in the car , 2012, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[2]  Zöe Handley.  Is text-to-speech synthesis ready for use in computer-assisted language learning? , 2009, Speech Commun..

[3]  Mahesh Viswanathan,et al.  Measuring speech quality for text-to-speech systems: development and assessment of a modified mean opinion score (MOS) scale , 2005, Comput. Speech Lang..

[4]  Jan Kleindienst,et al.  Dictating and editing short texts while driving: distraction and task completion , 2011, AutomotiveUI.

[5]  B. Thomas,et al.  Usability Evaluation In Industry , 1996 .

[6]  Clare-Marie Karat,et al.  Overcoming unusability: developing efficient strategies in speech recognition systems , 2000, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[7]  Annie Pauzie,et al.  Evaluation of Driver Mental Workload Facing New In-Vehicle Information and CommunicationTechnology , 2007 .

[8]  Jan Kleindienst,et al.  Mostly Passive Information Delivery - a Prototype , 2014, DM@EACL.

[9]  S. Hart,et al.  Development of NASA-TLX (Task Load Index): Results of Empirical and Theoretical Research , 1988 .

[10]  Robert Graham,et al.  Towards a tool for the Subjective Assessment of Speech System Interfaces (SASSI) , 2000, Natural Language Engineering.

[11]  Albrecht Schmidt,et al.  Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications , 2010, AutomotiveUI 2012.

[12]  A. Pauzie,et al.  A method to assess the driver mental workload: The driving activity load index (DALI) , 2008 .

[13]  Arthur F. Kramer,et al.  The Effects of Speech Production and Speech Comprehension on Simulated Driving Performance , 2006 .

[14]  P. Hancock,et al.  Human Mental Workload , 1988 .

[15]  J. B. Brooke,et al.  SUS: A 'Quick and Dirty' Usability Scale , 1996 .

[16]  Peter Bengtsson,et al.  Correlation between safety assessments in the driver-car interaction design process. , 2011, Applied ergonomics.

[17]  Jan Kleindienst,et al.  Recipes for building voice search UIs for automotive , 2014, DM@EACL.

[18]  Tim Paek,et al.  A voice search approach to replying to SMS messages in automobiles , 2009, INTERSPEECH.

[19]  D. Strayer,et al.  Passenger and Cell-Phone Conversations in Simulated Driving , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. Applied.