Future automobile driving space voice interaction: adapt to the driving scenarios and user personalities

Abstract: This paper investigates in-car voice interaction, where in-car voice assistants are becoming a common form of interaction in the car. However, voice assistants are unable to naturally perform emotional feedback based on traffic scenarios and driver state, so we explore the perspective of voice emotion in order to improve the in-car VUI experience. We designed five driving scenarios and tasks and four typical emotional voices. Participants were asked to experience each of the four emotional voice assistants in these five driving scenarios and tasks via a driving simulator and their feedback was collected through questionnaire ratings and interviews. And we also collected user personality traits (Big Five Inventory).In this paper, we assessed the emotional needs of in-car VUIs in different situations and made design recommendations for future in-car voice assistants. To explore the relationship between voice assistants’ emotional styles, driving scenarios and tasks, and users, we designed a series of voice assistants with four emotional styles (Joy, Relaxed, Urgent, and Neutral), recorded audio samples for five specified driving scenarios and tasks. Seven participants were invited to evaluate the voices, then based on the feedback, the voices were improved until they conformed to the set emotional styles. As dependent variables, we collected user personality traits (Big Five Inventory). Then we conducted a simulated driving experiment. Several participants with driving experience (N=26) were asked to experiment with five different driving scenario tasks in turn, with all four emotional voice assistants being tested in each driving scenario task. Then participants provided their insights through questionnaire scoring and semi-structured interviews.Our results show that users are more satisfied with voice assistants when their emotional style is matched to the driving scenario and task. For example, voice should be serious and brief in situations related to driving performance and driving safety, while in situations not related to driving performance (e. g. in-car entertainment) the voice assistant should be more lively and chatty. The experimental results also show that the user's gender and personality also have an impact on the emotional style preferences of the voice assistant. In the scenario tasks of Passenger assistance, Navigation, and Proactive assistance, the preferences of female users differed significantly from those of male users (p<0.05). In pairwise comparisons, participants who preferred Joy scored significantly higher in extraversion than all other groups (p < 0.05). Consequently, adapting the right emotional voice to different driving situations and user personalities has a positive impact on increasing user satisfaction.

Keywords: Automotive UI, Voice user interface, Emotional voice assistant, User experience

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1003420

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