Analyzing the Effects of Spoken Dialog Systems on Driving Behavior

This paper presents an evaluation of a spoken dialog system for automotive environments. Our overall goal was to measure the impact of user-system interaction on the user's driving performance, and to determine whether adding context-awareness to the dialog system might reduce the degree of user distraction during driving. To address this issue, we incorporated context-awareness into a spoken dialog system, and implemented three system features using user context, network context and dialog context. A series of experiments were conducted under three different configurations: driving without a dialog system, driving while using a context-aware dialog system, and driving while using a context-unaware dialog system. We measured the differences between the three configurations by comparing the average car speed, the frequency of speed changes and the angle between the car's direction and the centerline on the road. These results indicate that context-awareness could reduce the degree of user distraction when using a dialog system during driving.