We have recently accepted paper to the upcoming AutomotiveUI 2014 conference, which will take place in Seattle, U.S.A.

Title: Better Driving and Recall When In-car Information Presentation Uses Situationally-Aware Incremental Speech Output Generation

Authors: Spyros Kousidis, Casey Kennington, Timo Baumann, Hendrik Buschmeier, Stefan Kopp, David Schlangen

Abstract:
It is by now established that driver distraction is the result of
sharing cognitive resources between the primary task (driving)
and any other secondary task. In the case of holding conversations,
a human passenger who is aware of the driving
conditions can choose to interrupt his/her speech in situations
potentially requiring more attention from the driver; but incar
information systems typically do not exhibit such sensitivity.
We have designed and tested such a system in a driving
simulation environment. Unlike other systems, our system
delivers information via speech (calendar entries with scheduled
meetings) but is able to react to signals from the environment
to interrupt and subsequently resume its delivery when
the driver needs to be fully attentive to the driving task. Distraction
is measured by a secondary short-term memory task.
In both tasks, drivers perform significantly worse when the
system does not adapt its speech, while they perform equally
well to control conditions (no concurrent task) when the system
intelligently interrupts and resumes.