{"id":9799,"date":"2019-08-16T08:37:47","date_gmt":"2019-08-15T22:37:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/?p=9799"},"modified":"2020-06-20T00:08:33","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T14:08:33","slug":"a-few-snags-with-voice-control-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/automotive-design\/a-few-snags-with-voice-control-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"A Few Snags With Voice Control Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Michael, I don’t think these modern cars are quite up to my standard yet.<\/p><\/div>\n

Ever since at least the 1960s or possibly earlier, technologically minded geeky sorts have dreamed of having machines that will hear your voice and carry out your commands and popped this sort of tech into sci-fi stories. Kind of like having a very obedient slave who will do whatever is asked but without any of the nasty ethical implications.\u00a0 Possibly the dream of voice-activated machines is even older \u2013 if you look hard enough in old books, robot-type things have been turning up since the 1600s.\u00a0 Certainly, in the 1970s and early 80s when the way you got a computer to do something was by feeding in a punch card, the idea of just being able to tell it what to do would have seemed like the ultimate.\u00a0 The people with these fantasies were probably the ones who dreamed up Knight Rider and the intelligent car named KITT\u2026 and the ones who are designing cars and in-car tech grew up watching this show.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to today and we\u2019ve got quite a few computerized systems inside our vehicles, It\u2019s likely that if you pick up, say, a brand new Mercedes-Benz, it will have far more electronics and computer bits and pieces than the Apollo that reached the moon.\u00a0 Even better: a lot of bits and pieces inside a new car are voice activated. We\u2019ve got to the point that if you watch a rerun of Knight Rider with a teenager, their response to KITT\u2019s cool functions is likely to be \u201cSo what?\u201d<\/p>\n

These bits and pieces tend to be related to things like navigation, music and the phone; in other words, the sorts of things that you do on your phone anyway.\u00a0 The idea behind it is a compromise between safety and connectedness. Instead of having to take your eyes off the road and your hands off the wheel to poke around with your playlists or to call the boss and say you\u2019ll be late because you\u2019re stuck in traffic when you actually are stuck in traffic, you can do this just with your voice. \u00a0Both Apple and Android allow you to do this, and a few marques have their own systems \u2013 Ford, BMW and Fiat, to name a few.\u00a0 In some vehicles, you can also control the temperature settings via voice control, though those who have used them report that you have to be specific and keep it simple. I guess the people developing the tech didn\u2019t really want the climate control system to suddenly add a bit of chill when the sound system is playing \u201cFeeling Hot, Hot, Hot\u201d.<\/p>\n

There are more ideas in the pipeline and have just been introduced.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve got the right apps and the right devices (hello, Alexa!), you can check if the boot and the sunroof are closed properly and what the battery status in an EV is (BMW); lock and unlock the doors remotely (Ford Chrysler) and more.\u00a0 There\u2019s talk that BMW is thinking of introducing a feature that will allow you to dictate and send an email entirely by voice.\u00a0 I mean, what could possibly go wrong with that? I keep getting mental pictures of someone trying to write something really important having a near miss on the road (caused by somebody or something else) so that in the middle of the formal apology or job application, the reader encounters the words \u201cStupid mutt \u2013 get out of the way!\u201d (That\u2019s the polite version \u2013 insert unprintable adjectives if desired.)<\/p>\n

Which leads me nicely to the couple of existing snags with voice recognition software in vehicles \u2013 and outside of the vehicle that a number of people have picked up on.<\/p>\n

The first relates to getting the voice recognition system to actually pick up on what you\u2019re saying. The interior of your vehicle tends to be noisier than, say, your living room.\u00a0 Even if you\u2019re in a nice quiet EV or hybrid running on the electric motor, there is noise from the ambient traffic around you, bumps in the road and fans.\u00a0 The noise increases if you\u2019re in an ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle or if your hybrid is running on the non-electric motor. This makes it hard for those voice recognition systems to make out what you\u2019re saying. Heck, it can sometimes be hard for another human to make out what you\u2019re saying in these conditions, as quite a few married couples probably already know.<\/p>\n

The system also has trouble distinguishing the voice of the driver from the voices of the passengers, so if there are kids in the back trying to chatter away while you try to tell the navigation system to find you the nearest petrol station (or EV charging station) or call your mother, it won\u2019t understand you.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the problem with different voices.\u00a0 I remember the first time I came across some voice recognition telephone system and trying a number of times to get the stupid machine to recognize me, only succeeding when I faked a really, really cheesy American accent.\u00a0 Voice recognition systems are a whole lot better than they used to be but they still have problems.\u00a0 They like what they consider to be a \u201cnormal\u201d voice.\u00a0 The trouble is that what a lot of these systems consider to be a \u201cnormal\u201d voice is one with a standard accent.\u00a0 Introduce a very broad regional accent (Scottish and Irish drivers, for example, have real problems) or a non-native speaker accent and voice recognition systems throw a wobbly.\u00a0 A few researchers have also discovered that in-car voice recognitions systems have more problems with female voices than male voices.\u00a0 Which explains why my Brazilian sister-in-law doesn\u2019t use these features.<\/p>\n

Navigation systems are the main place that people notice these glitches.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve programmed your system to go somewhere and it\u2019s reading the directions out to you, it has to \u201cguess\u201d how to read the street names out, sometimes with hilarious results.\u00a0 Or you try saying the name of some restaurant you want to find the way to but it fails to pick it up; these systems are fine with mainstream outlets like Starbucks but they go to pieces on niche and boutique places \u2013 think English pub names like The Goat and Compasses or French restaurants like Mon Petit Escargot (I made that one up).<\/p>\n

These problems often mean that the users get frustrated and end up picking up the phone to do the dialling or the searching manually, which defeats the purpose of having the hands-free voice activated in-car tech in the first place. \u00a0Add in the fact that the users are probably getting frustrated by this stage and you\u2019ll probably find that they\u2019re driving less safely than they would if they just pressed a touchscreen in the first place.<\/p>\n

However, the problems with voice recognition systems, in cars and out of them, have their funny side, so on that note I\u2019ll leave you with this little clip\u2026
\n