Are voice & gesture controls for autonomous cars the next big thing?

Voice recognition algorithms have been used in infotainment systems for the past few years.
Are voice & gesture controls for autonomous cars the next big thing?By Krishna Kishore

Customarily, deciding factors for buying a car are mileage, safety, comfort. These factors have become asepsis and consumers have decided to buy cars based on their music system and infotainment system. Infotainment systems have evolved from providing just FM players to CD audio players to providing much functionality such as navigation, voice call through a phone paired over Bluetooth.

As features of infotainment system have increased, drivers’ attention to operate the infotainment system has also increased. Drivers have to move their eyes off the road to switch between songs, and applications. This is a safety concern. This has been addressed by having controls on steering wheels that have enabled drivers to operate infotainment system remotely without diverting his/her view on road.

As the features of infotainment continue to increase, it is not possible to have steering wheels that control all the features due to space constraint. Not to mention the problem of drivers speeding up to search for an appropriate control button. Steering wheel controls are not a scalable option considering the pace at which features of infotainment system are increasing. Voice and gesture based input mechanism is addressing this challenge.

Voice recognition algorithms have been used in infotainment systems for the past few years. These are offline algorithms which need language models to be fed - for example, contact list language model needs to be fed to allow users to select contacts through a voice command. These models would be loaded over Bluetooth or preloaded in factory. Understandably, this model needs to be updated regularly so as to keep it up to date.

In recent years, online voice recognition has become more advanced in providing features such as answering questions, and making recommendations by interfacing with other web services. Siri from Apple was released in 2011. Later in 2014, Amazon Alexa was released followed by, Google assistant that was released in 2016.

These voice assistants have been getting integrated into speakers to allow users to ask questions. This evolved to manage services such as music, and control end devices such as light bulbs, and refrigerators. Gartner says that there will be around 2 billion wireless speakers by 2020.
Amazon Alexa is getting integrated into a variety of devices. Considering that cars are also connected to home network through voice commands, users/drivers will be able to control devices from home, and also start their favorite music. This will enable used cases such as asking voice assistant to open garage doors, and initiate a voice call.

In infotainment systems, there will be a need for drivers to use voice commands in order to minimize distraction. The used cases will be initiating a route map, music player controls, and ask answers to get answers from various web services. Voice assistant services such as Alexa provides cloud APIs to send voice samples and send responses after processing the voice command and interacting with other internet services.

With cameras and depth sensors becoming common, gestures such as pointing, swiping, and pushing are being used to control infotainment systems instead of turning nobs, and tapping options on the screen.

The challenges with voice and gesture based controls is that the algorithms have to be so effective that they must have the ability to be context aware in order to ignore unintentional gestures in the very first time itself.

(He is the Senior Architect, Sasken Technologies Limited)


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