Texting While Driving Is probably not So Bad When It’s Hands Free [Video]

Reminiscent of OnStar’s September launch of voice-activated Facebook and texting, Windows Embedded Automotive 7 has evolved to enable voice commands that permit you be in contact without touching your phone.

The upside: an awful lot less accidents because of keyboard fumbling, hopefully. The drawback: every email sounding love it was sent by Rosie the robot. Fair trade!

Windows Embedded Automotive 7 Brings Hands-Free E-Mail and Text for your Car

REDMOND, Wash. – Nov. 30, 2011 – Within the near future, when your car’s infotainment system is sending voice-dictated text messages and reading your e-mail to you, take into account how someone first had to determine a way to teach your car to recognize words like ” aunt Ethel,” ” holidays,” ” vegan” and ” tofu turkey.”

Hands-free e-mail and texting through voice command are the various most hotly anticipated features that can soon be available in vehicles with infotainment systems powered by the Windows Embedded Automotive 7 platform. These features enable drivers and passengers to have e-mail messages read to them, and to compose and send SMS text messages through their cars just as they do now through mobile devices – only they’ll do it by voice, not with keypads.

Drivers can reply to text messages using voice controls wherein the system matches the motive force’s reply to stored messages like ” Running late” or ” See you in 10 minutes.” This results in a higher overall driving experience and no more distraction for drivers – permitting them to keep their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel. A video from Steven Bridgeland, product manager for Microsoft’s Windows Embedded Business, demonstrates a prototype of these voice apps working together.

But who’s teaching your future car to chat and understand what you’re saying? That’s the outcome of a partnership between three Microsoft teams: Windows Embedded, Microsoft Research and Microsoft Tellme.

Forming a productive, cross-company partnership, Microsoft Research, Windows Embedded and Microsoft Tellme developed sophisticated voice search and audio processing algorithms for the Windows Embedded Automotive platform that help in-car systems recognize what the driving force is saying. The team also helped pioneer using its sophisticated, cloud-based speech recognition in a huge automobile manufacturer to produce drivers with audio updates on traffic, directions and weather conditions.

When they created the SMS Reply voice solution, developers collected thousands of real-world SMS replies and turned them into templates – for instance, the sentence ” See you in five minutes.” When a driver tells the in-car system to create an SMS message containing the words ” see you in,” followed by a bunch and the word ” minutes,” the system can quickly match that phrase to all relevant templates and insert the best number of minutes. It should then repeat back a listing of essentially the mostsome of the most relevant SMS replies, and the motive force picks one of the best-matched reply to send.

Speech recognition has come far in recent times, and recent breakthroughs in technology mean that progress is accelerating – no pun intended. For instance, some in-car systems powered by Windows Embedded Automotive use cloud computing to make the product better as people use it: In these cases, what customers tell the system to do improves the system’s overall performance.

As Microsoft continues to develop the Windows Embedded Automotive software platform, drivers and passengers can stay up for communicating with friends, family and associates through e-mail and text uninterrupted as they go from computer to phone to car through the day. And we’ll be telling you all about it here on the Windows Embedded News Center – but for now, don’t forget to pick out up that tofu turkey for aunt Ethel.

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This post is tagged: driving experience, hands on the wheel, infotainment system, microsoft research, sms text messages