Driving Safer with In-Car Speech Technologies

The speech technologies industry has grown over the years to offer a number of sophisticated, life-like voices for natural, human to computer interaction.

 

For the automotive market, these technologies are not only a luxury but also a must-have for safer driving.

 

Turin, Italy-based Loquendo (News - Alert) offers a full range of speech solutions from TTS and speech recognition to voice platforms, embedded solutions and speaker verification solutions.

 

Currently, the company offers a total of 27 languages and 65 voices, including: Russian, Australian English, U.S. and U.K. English, Mandarin Chinese, French, Canadian French, American Spanish, Mexican, and many more continually being added.

 

In-car speech solutions are especially important today as the rate of car accidents related to distraction from use of a cell phone and other devices while driving, rises.  
 

One survey conducted by FindLaw.com found that almost half of drivers between the ages of 18 and 24 have sent a text message, instant message or e-mail while driving while 17 percent of all adults surveyed admitted to combining these two activities.

 

And another AAA survey also uncovered that, more than half of the drivers that admitted to reading or sending text messages or e-mails while driving, were much more likely to have an accident.

 

President Barack Obama also reportedly signed an executive order law recently to ban federal workers from sending text messages while driving government vehicles or their own vehicles while on the job.

 

All of these concerns around the use of devices while driving has increased the need for in-car speech solutions.

 

Loquendo TTS Automotive, one of the company’s best selling solutions, makes it possible to easily integrate multilingual, natural sounding speech into a car’s dashboard.

 

According to Paolo Coppo, Loquendo’s vice president of Marketing and Business Development, “A key feature of Loquendo’s Automotive Solution is the integration of

pre-recorded prompts with text to speech technology.”

 

Thanks to the companies continued quality improvements and their natural, highly expressive voices, the navigation industry has embraced speech technology.

 

In addition to providing natural sounding voices to read out directions from a navigation device, Loquendo’s emotional TTS offering also reads out traffic announcements, names, reads messages and emails, and even reads out e-books.

 

With mobile users on the rise, and more and more applications and devices being introduced daily, Coppo says the value in in-car speech technologies had become even more evident.

 

“People have now understood that the only truly safe and realistic solution for operating and switching between all these devices is to use the voice. With a speech interface you have unlimited mobility – users are free to get the most out of their on-board devices, but also, and more importantly, they are free to concentrate on driving the vehicle safely.”