Design and Development of a Speech-driven Control for a In-car Personal Navigation System

Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2005, pages 224–232, Sydney, Australia, December 2005. Design and development of a speech-driven control for an in-car personal navigation system Ying Su, Tao Bai, and Catherine I. Watson Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand c.watson@auckland.ac.nz Abstract The paper outlines the development and design of a speech driven control for a personal in-car navigation system which runs on a standard Pocket PC. The modified system enables speech driven menu navigation, speech shortcut commands and interactive dialogues. The speech recognition method is presented, sources of inaccurate recognition are identified, and solutions are presented. Speech recognition accuracies of 96% and 88%, depending on the task, are achieved in an in-car environment. One draw back is the time taken to perform the recognition. The speech driven control module which interfaces with the in-car navigator is designed to be flexible. These features are discussed. 1 Introduction This paper presents the design and development of a proto-type speech-driven control for a personal in-car navigation system. The navigation system is currently on the market, it is an as automatic navigation software application integrated into a Pocket PC operating environment. Like most software applications on a Personal Digital Assistance (PDA), it requires manual user control via the hardware interface of the device, which consists of the touch screen. This has obvious limitations for in-car use, and a hand-free speech driven solution to control the navigator is being investigated. With the navigation system, the user is able to access automatically extracted map information, GPS localization, and navigation instructions via a graphical interface (GUI). The application also performs analysis of the trip and automatic routing to the destination address entered by the user, which helps improve the efficiency of travelling. Besides the navigation features, the application also allows the user to customize the preference settings using the menus as part of the GUI. In order to develop a prototype solution to enable speech-driven control for the in-car navigation system (hence forth called the Drive Router) there were two major functionality requirements; 1. the acquisition and recognition of user speech signals, and 2. the controlling the in- car navigation system according to the recognized speech commands. The control features specified in this prototype were speech-driven menu navigation, speech shortcut commands, and interactive dialogs. The menu navigation feature allows the user to navigate through the different menus and preference setting screens of the GUI of the Drive Router by saying the names of the buttons on the GUI. The shortcut command triggers a transition that normally requires a series of GUI control actions. For example when the application is displaying the map screen, upon the recognition of the phrase “GPS status”, the GPS status screen will appear, this originally required the user to navigate through two menus to get it. Interactive dialog provides an efficient way for complex information retrieval. In this prototype, it is used to retrieve a destination address from the user. These three features cover a …

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