Stefanie Olsen
For anyone who has driven behind someone talking on their mobile phone while swerving around at 70mph, here's a disquieting thought: things may get worse before they get better.
Mobile phones aren't the only gadgets in the car anymore. MP3 players, digital radio, handheld organisers, DVD players and satellite-navigation devices are quickly becoming common accoutrements of the modern car. And that means drivers have more buttons, keypads and click-wheels to twiddle with while navigating the road.
Obvious safety concerns and legislation in various countries are forcing car makers to look for a solution -- and one may be on the way with new technology that lets people keep their hands on the wheel and 'tell' their gadgets what to do with voice controls.
"There's fairly significant demand for 'button-intensive' features in the car like dual climate zones and satellite radio," the US equivalent of DAB that has more than 120 channels, said Jim Pisz, national manager for partnerships at Toyota. "The future for us is in the ability to control all of these features by voice."
Of course, it may be a few years before mass-production vehicles synchronise electronic devices for voice control, but momentum is building for features that let people ask for driving directions or call a friend without using their hands.
Last week, for example, Toyota partnered with a relatively unknown voice-search specialist called VoiceBox. In development for roughly three years, VoiceBox's technology differs from established voice tech on the market because it allows people to speak conversationally to operate car electronics, rather than having them memorise and deliberately sound out commands.
The two companies are developing natural-speech technologies for Toyota's cars, but Pisz would only say that they'll become more common in cars within the next few years. "We're evaluating it at the highest levels," he said.
VoiceBox recently signed a major deal with XM Satellite Radio to add voice-search capability to its channel-rich service, which is available to more than 6 million people in the US, many of whom listen in the car.
VoiceBox has also teamed with Johnson Controls, one of the biggest technology suppliers to the car industry. One early product of their deal is a node that lets people search music on Apple's iPod by voice in the car. The product is expected to be available this year.
"Wherever you have a large menu of files to choose from -- song files, phone contacts, local directories -- voice technology is inevitable," said Veerender Kaul, research manager for advanced car technology at Frost & Sullivan, a research firm.
Certainly, for car navigation systems voice tech has been around for years, as it has for call centres. Many high-end to midrange vehicles like Lexus' range and Honda's Acura include voice-command features for driving directions. But those technologies have long delivered a frustrating experience to consumers, thanks to a limited vocabulary of commands or poor recognition of synonyms and accents.
"The main problem is that most of the voice-based engines haven't been very reliable in the past," said Thilo Koslowski, vice president and lead car analyst at market-research firm Gartner.
VoiceBox's engineers think they can change that. It was founded in 2001 by Bob Kennewick, a Harvard University associate professor with degrees in economics and computer science. He recognised a fundamental problem with existing voice recognition, which required programmers to set up specific dictionaries for a given set of data, and then match speech to text. But users had to say the right words to make it work. Background noises could also muddle the translation.
His vision was to develop technology that could recognise the context of speech, picking up the right cues in a conversation to answer like a human would. For example, a request like: "Let me hear Cisco" could translate to the technology as a request to hear the singer Sisco, find a stock quote on the company Cisco Systems, or listen to the Johnny Cash song, Cisco Spilling Station. The technology, which Kennewick developed, answers such a request by asking which of these options the person would like to hear.
In some contexts, the technology wouldn't need to provide options. A request for a stock quote on Microsoft followed by the name Cisco would immediately prompt another quote, for example. The VoiceBox technology would learn from experience by recognising repeated requests for information and responding to personal preferences.
"It looks for clues in what you're saying and what you've said before to infer what you want, just like a human would," said Mike Kennewick, the founder's brother and current CEO of VoiceBox.
Mike Kennewick was a Microsoft business development executive for Windows in the 1980s. The brothers teamed up with two friends to found the company in 2001. It now employs more than 40 speech-recognition engineers.
According to Toyota and industry analysts, VoiceBox is one of only a handful of companies working on conversational voice-search technology.
OnStar, the telematics company inside General Motors, has long been an advocate of voice recognition in cars. Coming up to its tenth anniversary, OnStar has 4 million subscribers and its hardware is set to become standard equipment in GM cars by 2008. With the system, drivers push a button and talk to consultants to report an accident or unlock a door. (The company does about 1,000 airbag calls a month.)
Drivers can also make calls from a built-in voice-activated mobile phone if they sign up with a programme. "When you push a button, the radio mutes automatically," said Chet Huber, president of OnStar. "We use voice recognition so your hands are on the wheel. You can say 'call home', and it will call home."
Other big players in advanced search recognition, or voice recognition, include IBM, Microsoft and ScanSoft. Microsoft, for example, sells voice-recognition technology with its operating system for cars, but the system responds to commands rather than to contextual speech.
VoiceBox executives think the large companies are potential partners. Toyota, for example, plans to use VoiceBox technology on top of IBM software.
Microsoft's voice technology will be available in European cars made by Fiat next month. Fiat, which owns Alfa Romeo, will offer voice-command features for mobile phones and digital music players that can be hooked up to nearly 23 models of its cars, through Windows Mobile Automotive technology.
Honda's Acura runs Microsoft's car operating system, but its speech recognition is provided by IBM.
Johnson and VoiceBox have a commercially ready product that integrates voice commands in 'centre stack' software and hardware so that if a phone, MP3 player or handheld has Bluetooth support, it will let a person dial by voice or ask for songs. For its iPod search tool, Johnson worked with Apple. The Mac maker has said a large number of its iPod consumers use the music player in the car. The technology is commercially ready and lets drivers use voice search for songs in the car.
For XM Satellite Radio, VoiceBox is likely to be a welcome feature, because it can give people easy access to relatively unknown features, like regular traffic updates, sport scores or stock quotes. People can say: "What's traffic like on 101?" and VoiceBox will tick off an answer. XM Satellite plans to introduce the product in the middle of this year.
Gartner's Koslowski said that Apple is also probably working with the car industry on voice technology, as well as developing it in-house. He also suggested that all the Internet search companies such as Google will probably look at markets like the car business, in which people need to search for files but don't have use of their hands.
"Consumers fundamentally want voice to work -- it's in our imagination with shows like The Jetsons and Star Trek," Kennewick said. "We think this will be a more compelling experience for people."
CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos contributed to this report.
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