This study examined destination entry while driving with four commercially available route guidance systems. Three of the systems involved various visual-manual demands while the fourth involved voice input and output. Cellular phone dialing and radio tuning were included as comparison tasks. Test participants drove an instrumented passenger car, accompanied by an experimenter, on a 7.5 mile multilane test track with light traffic. Results indicated that, on average, all three systems with visual-manual methods of destination entry were associated with lengthier completion times, longer eyes-off-road-ahead times, longer and more frequent glances to the device, and greater numbers of lane exceedences than the voice system. However, the voice system was associated with substantially longer and more frequent glances away from the road scene to a containing destination information. Performance differences between younger and older test participants tended to be reduced with the voice system. Regardless of system, the destination entry task took substantially longer to complete than 10-digit cellular telephone dialing or radio tuning to a specific frequency. Voice recognition technology appears to be a viable alternative to manual destination entry while driving but other subtle safety issues remain and are discussed. For the covering abstract see IRRD E102946.
Abstract