A Multimodal Virtual Co-driver's Problems with the Driver

The paper discusses a series of four user-oriented design analysis problems in a research prototype multimodal spoken language dialogue system for supporting drivers whilst driving. The problems are: (a) when should the system (not) listen to the speech and non-speech acoustics in the car; (b) how to use the in-car display in conjunction with spoken driver-system dialogue; (c) how to identify the present driver as a basis for building a user model of the driver; and (d) how to create useful adaptive user modelling of the driver. The system discussed is under development and is called VICO or Virtual Intelligent CO-driver.