How Effective an Odd Message Can Be: Appropriate and Inappropriate Topics in Speech-Based Vehicle Interfaces

Authors

  • David Sirkin Stanford University
  • Kerstin Fischer Southern Denmark University
  • Lars Jensen Southern Denmark University
  • Wendy Ju Stanford University and California College of the Arts

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/hcomp.v3i1.13257

Keywords:

driver vehicle interaction, speech interfaces, wizard of oz, research protocol

Abstract

Dialog between drivers and speech-based vehicle interfaces can be used as an instrument to find out what drivers might be concerned, confused or curious about in driving simulator studies. Eliciting on-going conversation with drivers about topics that go beyond navigation, control of entertainment systems, or other traditional driving related tasks is important to getting drivers to engage with the activity in an open-ended fashion. In a structured improvisational Wizard of Oz study that took place in a highly immersive driving simulator, we engaged participant drivers (N=6) in an autonomous driving course where the vehicle spoke to drivers using computer-generated natural language speech. Using microanalyses of the drivers’ responses to the car’s utter- ances, we identify a set of topics that are expected and treated as appropriate by the participants in our study, as well as a set of topics and conversational strategies that are treated as inappropriate. We also show that it is just these unexpected, inappropriate utterances that eventually increase users’ trust in the system, make them more at ease, and raise the system’s acceptability as a communication partner.

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Published

2015-09-23

How to Cite

Sirkin, D., Fischer, K., Jensen, L., & Ju, W. (2015). How Effective an Odd Message Can Be: Appropriate and Inappropriate Topics in Speech-Based Vehicle Interfaces. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing, 3(1), 36-37. https://doi.org/10.1609/hcomp.v3i1.13257