By Roland Piquepaille
Because she is concerned about the emerging usage of Internet in cars, Dr. Meirav Taieb-Maimon, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, has designed a new search engine that leaves your hands free. In this article, Discovery News writes that the system is using voice-recognition software, a microphone and speakers. The software itself is composed of three elements, two speech recognition components from Microsoft and a custom piece of software called 'Maestro.' When a driver says something such as 'nearest gas station,' Maestro converts speech to text, builds a search query and sends it to a search engine. It then converts back the results to spoken instructions for the driver. More research needs to be done to know if the system is safe for driving. If it proves to be safe, a 'Maestro' might be the Web driver in your next car. Read more...First, how does the system work?
Let's say a person wants to find a restaurant in Manhattan that has gotten good reviews. First, she would first dictate her query by saying, "Restaurants New York City."
Maestro triggers the speech recognition software to convert the speech to text and then delivers it to a so-called "query builder," which puts the request in language a search engine such as Google can understand.
The query builder returns the query to Maestro, which then delivers it to a search engine. When the results come back, Maestro sends them to the text to speech component for the driver to hear.
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The 'Maestro' project is the first application developed that can completely search and browse the Internet via voice interface. (Credit: Dani Machlis). |
The image above and its accompanying legend come from this article from Allison Kaplan Sommer published by Israel21c.
So when will we have a 'Maestro' driving the Web for us?
Taieb-Maimon would like to see more safety tests conducted before such a system finds it's way into automobiles.
Currently, she is preparing a study that will compare driver distraction while using the Maestro system to how much a driver is preoccupied while not using the voice-activated search function to how much they are distracted while conversing with another passenger.
As Taieb-Maimon said to Israel21c, the use of Internet in cars is "inevitable," so it's better to design a safe system for surfing while driving.
"With more and more people now working out of the office and trying to be productive as they travel, these kinds of systems are being developed and used. People want to use their driving time to work," she told Israel21c.
As even hands-free cell phones are forbidden to use in many areas around the world, I wonder what is the future for a hands-free search engine. Would you use such a system?
Sources: Tracy Staedter, Discovery News, June 30, 2005; Allison Kaplan Sommer, Israel21c, May 29, 2005
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