Enhancing the Usability of Multimodal Virtual Co-drivers

This chapter 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 make use of the in-car display in conjunction with spoken driver-system dialogue; (c) how to identify the present driver as a basis for building user models of the driver; and (d) how to create useful online adaptive user modelling of the driver.