The voice user help, a smart vehicle assistant for the elderly

Abstract

The rapid advancement of vehicular technologies has resulted in an exponential increase of new vehicle functions road assistance and connected vehicles services. Vehicle manuals are designed to provide support and information about the use and maintenance of these features. However, current vehicle user manuals do not allow looking for information under driving conditions. This paper presents the Voice User Help, a smart voice-operated system that utilizes natural language understanding and emotional adaptive interfaces to assist drivers when looking for vehicle information with minimal effect on their driving performance. Additionally, the system presents an opportunity for elder drivers to reduce the learning curve of new in-vehicle technologies and improve efficiency. Results on user acceptance of the Voice User Help, as well as cognitive load and driver distraction effects generated during a simulated drive indicate that the Voice User help is an extremely desirable feature and potentially safe application since it did not significantly decrement driving performance. Furthermore preliminary results on adaptive voice interfaces using emotion recognition indicate that personalization of the interaction will be able to palliate possible negative effects that happen during system error recovery. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.