Study finds it's safer to talk on the phone while driving

WHILE POLITICIANS have a nasty habit of working from gut feeling, speech specialist – Nuance – bothered to commission a study of in-car driver distraction.

Astonishingly, the study found that it is safer to be placing a call using voice dialling while driving than it is to be bowling along doing nothing.

According to Fatima Vital, marketing manager with Nuance, that is because driving along doing nothing is tedious but if you give the brain another simple task to perform, then it's easier to concentrate on your driving.

The study on in-car distraction was commissioned from the Technical University of Brunswick in Germany. It involved showing 30 drivers in front of a simulator and then getting them to perform an industry-standard lane change task (LCT) test.

While they were lane changing lanes, the drivers were asked to carry out five main tasks both manually and using speech control.

Besides getting the phone to dial a pre-set number, they were asked to select a music track; set a point-of-interest in the sat nav; carry out a task that needs only a single confirmation and carrying out a task using multiple confirmations.

The study showed that the most dangerous task around would be to try to select a music track manually. Vital observed that if Brussels should be considering banning any kind of electronic device inside a car at all, then Ipods were way ahead of mobile phones.

The study compared how distracting each task was both when performed manually against when the task is carried out using speech control.

There was the least difference when drivers were asked to place a call (manually versus via speech).

At the other end of the scale was selecting a music track manually. The distraction decreased if a track could be selected by voice using multiple inputs - artist and track name, for example.

But if a system was used that allowed the speaker to say the track name and artist together, the decrease was even more noticeable.

Nuance then trotted out its latest bit of speech recognition software called 'one shot address entry'.

This allows a driver to say the complete address rather than having to say " city, Blah, street, Blah, house number, Blah".

The software worked well but then it was running on a PC. The snag is that PCs are very roughly four times faster than in-car navigation systems - at least.

And in-car systems are roughly four times faster than smartphones. That means (thanks to rounding down the numbers), the PC was actually about 20 times faster than a smartphone.

So we have some way to go before one shot address entry gets inside mobile phones.

There is a further oddity. According to Lewis Mowatt, product manager automotive, with Nuance, in-car systems have far less RAM than PCs. That might be be a surprise, but a typical in-car system would be lucky to have 64MB of RAM because cars represent an extremely harsh electrical environment, apparently. µ