New research shows that serious distraction can result when drivers use Siri, Apple’s voice activation system, to navigate, send and receive texts, use Facebook or Twitter.
The research, sponsored by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and conducted at the University of Utah, shows that distraction risks happen with other voice-activated technologies, which are gaining popularity with drivers looking to comply with recent distracted driving laws.
During testing, researchers found that most distracting voice-activating systems flustered drivers to the point of them “cursing the systems out” for misunderstanding words and commands, said David Strayer, Strayer, a neuroscientist with the University of Utah who led the research, and at one point, someone testing one of the voice-activated systems “tried to change the radio and it instead changed the temperature in the car.”
Several provinces have enacted tough distracted driving and hand-held cell phone laws, with penalties ranging from $167 in British Columbia to a stiff $322 in the Northwest Territories.
Only Nunavut has no fines or demerits for using hand-held cell phones while driving.
Police have recently cited distracted driving as being worse than impaired driving in causing serious accidents. New Brunswick RCMP say that motorists continue to text and drive, despite distracted driving being deemed the number one cause of fatal crashes in at least three provinces.
However, researchers found that some car maker voice-activation solutions, in particular Toyota’s Entune system and Hyundai’s Blue Link system, are proving less distracting than those offered by competitors. (continued.)
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“These systems can be designed so they aren’t very distracting to drivers,” said Dr. Strayer, who acknowledged that these systems are here to stay, so the goal should be to make them “no more distracting than listening to the radio.”
The Toyota system, for example, proved to be about as distracting as listening to a book on tape. But others, like ones offered by Mercedes and Chevrolet, proved far more distracting than using a handheld cellphone, states the study.
Of all the systems studied, Siri proved the most distracting, more so than even using “an error prone voice-based menu system.” In the study, Siri was used by study subjects in a driving simulator, who wore a microphone to interact with the system.
