Talk to your car with new tech

For anyone who has driven behind someone talking on their mobile phone while swerving around at 70mph, here's a disquieting thought: things may get worse before they get better.

Mobile phones aren't the only gadgets in the car anymore. MP3 players, digital radio, handheld organisers, DVD players and satellite-navigation devices are quickly becoming common accoutrements of the modern car. And that means drivers have more buttons, keypads and click-wheels to twiddle with while navigating the road.

Obvious safety concerns and legislation in various countries are forcing car makers to look for a solution -- and one may be on the way with new technology that lets people keep their hands on the wheel and 'tell' their gadgets what to do with voice controls.

"There's fairly significant demand for 'button-intensive' features in the car like dual climate zones and satellite radio," the US equivalent of DAB that has more than 120 channels, said Jim Pisz, national manager for partnerships at Toyota. "The future for us is in the ability to control all of these features by voice."

Of course, it may be a few years before mass-production vehicles synchronise electronic devices for voice control, but momentum is building for features that let people ask for driving directions or call a friend without using their hands.

Last week, for example, Toyota partnered with a relatively unknown voice-search specialist called VoiceBox. In development for roughly three years, VoiceBox's technology differs from established voice tech on the market because it allows people to speak conversationally to operate car electronics, rather than having them memorise and deliberately sound out commands.

The two companies are developing natural-speech technologies for Toyota's cars, but Pisz would only say that they'll become more common in cars within the next few years. "We're evaluating it at the highest levels," he said.

VoiceBox recently signed a major deal with XM Satellite Radio to add voice-search capability to its channel-rich service, which is available to more than 6 million people in the US, many of whom listen in the car.

VoiceBox has also teamed with Johnson Controls, one of the biggest technology suppliers to the car industry. One early product of their deal is a node that lets people search music on Apple's iPod by voice in the car. The product is expected to be available this year.

"Wherever you have a large menu of files to choose from -- song files, phone contacts, local directories -- voice technology is inevitable," said Veerender Kaul, research manager for advanced car technology at Frost & Sullivan, a research firm.

Certainly, for car navigation systems voice tech has been around for years, as it has for call centres. Many high-end to midrange vehicles like Lexus' range and Honda's Acura include voice-command features for driving directions. But those technologies have long delivered a frustrating experience to consumers, thanks to a limited vocabulary of commands or poor recognition of synonyms and accents.

"The main problem is that most of the voice-based engines haven't been very reliable in the past," said Thilo Koslowski, vice president and lead car analyst at market-research firm Gartner.

VoiceBox's engineers think they can change that. It was founded in 2001 by Bob Kennewick, a Harvard University associate professor with degrees in economics and computer science. He recognised a fundamental problem with existing voice recognition, which required programmers to set up specific dictionaries for a given set of data, and then match speech to text. But users had to say the right words to make it work. Background noises could also muddle the translation.

His vision was to develop technology that could recognise the context of speech, picking up the right cues in a conversation to answer like a human would. For example, a request like: "Let me hear Cisco" could translate to the technology as a request to hear the singer Sisco, find a stock quote on the company Cisco Systems, or listen to the Johnny Cash song, Cisco Spilling Station. The technology, which Kennewick developed, answers such a request by asking which of these options the person would like to hear.