Spoken Dialogue Technologies for Drivers

Spoken language technologies, including speech recognition, natural language understanding, dialogue management, language generation and speech synthesis, can be important elements of driver interaction systems. They appear to offer the promise of a natural, hands-free, eyes-on-the-road way to interact with systems on and off the vehicle, especially systems that are rich in features and flexibility. This paper begins with a brief history of spoken language technologies in vehicles, examines some current applications and describes the special challenges of using speech technologies in the vehicle environment. Various approaches to meeting these challenges are examined. The paper describes the current state of spoken dialogue systems and provides some examples of their potential use in vehicles. The paper concludes with a description of the likely evolution of spoken language systems in vehicles.