WIRE 3 : Driving Around the Information Super-Highway

Abstract

Interactive voice browsers offer an alternative paradigm that affords ubiquitous mobile access to the WWW using a wide range of consumer devices. This technology can facilitate a safe, ''hands-free'' browsing environment that is of importance both to car drivers and various mobile and technical professionals. This paper describes the challenges of architecting an interactive voice browser that combines digital audio with the features of a speech synthesizer to make structural elements of the document explicit to the listener. The aesthetics of the audio rendition can simultaneously help reduce the monotony factor and enhance comprehension. The evolution of the voice browser gave rise to a new conceptual model of the HTML document structure and its mapping to a 3D audio space. A number of novel features are discussed for improving both the user's comprehension of the HTML document structure and their orientation within it. These factors, in turn, can improve the effectiveness of the browsing experience.

A user study of auditory versus visual interfaces for use while driving

“…The user interacts with the nomadic radio by the use of voice commands and tactile input. Goose and Djennane (2002) developed WIRE, the Webbased Interactive Radio Environment voice browser for providing drivers with access to WWW services whilst driving. WIRE analyses HTML documents and positions extracted elements according to type and location on to an arc expanding in front of the user.…”

Effects of reproduction equipment on interaction with a spatial audio interface

“…In noisy environments intelligibility is also likely to be reduced by the interference of other sounds. Goose and Safia [6] used speakers for spatial audio presentation since their proposed system was designed for inside a car. This option is a context specific solution and cannot be applied generally in more mobile situations.…”

“…In the literature there are examples of hierarchical content organization such as in Brewster et al [3], where users nod to select spatially positioned sounds in an auditory pie menu placed around their heads. Other applications include textual content presentation by means of synthesized speech [6,9]. Such applications commonly use spatial audio to sonify speaker position and structural information within a document.…”

Semi-aural Interfaces: Investigating Voice-controlled Aural Flows

“…DAWN presents a small set of global voice commands for moving across documents, such as skip and back. Web-based Interactive Radio Environment (WIRE) is an in-car voice browser designed to be used safely by a driver while in transit (Goose & Djennane, 2002). Similarly, VoxBoox translates HTML books into VoiceXML (Jain & Gupta, 2007) pages that are enhanced with voice commands during document translation to improve the browsing experience and offer additional navigation controls.…”