Siri Co-Creator Questions Texas A&M Texting-and-Driving Study
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telling the app something like, “Send a message to Mary: I’m going to be late for dinner.” Vlingo
Siri Co-Creator Questions Texas A&M Texting-and-Driving Study
(Page 2 of 2)
telling the app something like, “Send a message to Mary: I’m going to be late for dinner.” Vlingo works in much the same way.
Yager’s study is thought to be the first to evaluate the safety of voice-to-text apps as an alternative to fully manual texting.
In the study, 43 drivers navigated a 3.8 mile course along the runways of a former Air Force base that now serves as Texas A&M’s Riverside campus. They were driving a 2009 Ford Explorer equipped to record the drivers’ response times, gaze direction, speed, and lane position.
Yager and her team studied four scenarios: a baseline 30-mph drive with no texting, a drive that included manual texting tasks, a drive using Siri on an iPhone 4S, and a drive using Vlingo on an Android phone. A green LED light was mounted on the Explorer’s dashboard, and drivers were instructed to press a button every time they saw it come on. Their response times served as a measure of their distraction levels.
For the voice-to-text tasks, drivers were using the phones just as they would if they’d been standing on the sidewalk: that is, by holding the smartphone in one hand, activating Siri or Vlingo with a manual button press, speaking a message, proofreading it visually, correcting it if necessary, and sending it with another button press.
It would have been reasonable to expect to find slower response times among the people who were sending texts the old-fashioned way. And in fact, that’s what Yager’s team found—-their responses were delayed by a factor of 1.92.
The more surprising finding was that using Siri and Vlingo didn’t improve the situation much. “When texting using Siri, response times were delayed by a factor of 1.87; and when texting with Vlingo, response times were delayed by a factor of 1.77,” Yager’s report states.
Drivers also tended to slow down when they were texting, and to spend less time watching the forward roadway. The effects were equally severe whether the drivers were texting manually or using the voice-to-text apps.
In the end, Yager concluded that the voice-to-text apps are no less impairing to drivers than manual-entry texting.
And that’s where Cheyer’s objection begins. It’s already 