J.D. Power waded into the swamp of automotive voice recognition technology last week at the Center for Automotive Research’s Management Briefing Seminar in Traverse City.  JDP’s executive director of driver interaction, Kristin Kolodge, presented slides and videos to show JDP’s assessment of the abysmal state of VR today.

Kristin said JDP’s annual Initial Quality Study of vehicles sold in the U.S. revealed VR tech as the most common type of “malfunction.”  VR was to blame for one-third of infotainment system failures – which is significant since infotainment systems have emerged in the past few years as the single biggest source of failures in new cars.

Kristin’s prescription, according to the report on her talk in Automotive News, was to get back to basics – that automakers should give up trying to add new features.  This recommendation alarmed me because the industry is actually on the verge of a major industrywide upgrade to natural language speech recognition and this is no time to turn back.

Recognizing that it had a problem on its hands with VR technology, most car makers have been turning in the direction of the skid.  Car makers see that they need to do better and that doing better means bringing automotive grade speech recognition systems to cars that adapt to humans rather than forcing humans to adapt to them.

There are several problems with VR today and they include:

Overly specific menus and poorly conceived architectures

Attempts to use voice recognition where it is an inappropriate interface

Multiple on-board speech recognition systems

Voice interfaces that work with some apps and not others

Confusing cues

Speaking to an inanimate object is an unnatural act, so there is no surprise that getting consumers to change their behavior is a big step.  Ford took the biggest step by making speech recognition the focal point of the original SYNC system.  But Ford changed its VR architecture and expanded the vocabulary with SYNC Gen 2 with disastrous results.

The problem is that once consumers have had a bad experience, it is tough to win them back.  And winning consumers back to automotive VR is important because VR is a powerful tool for combatting driver distraction.

Unfortunately, VR systems on the road today - most of which were designed or created three yeras ago - actually create distraction.  So let’s quickly review where we are headed with speech recognition:

NLU is the future of VR in the car

Whether you look to AT&T’s Watson or Nuance’s Dragon Drive or to VoiceBox’s conversational recognizer, VR tech is rapidly becoming a more natural experience in the car thanks to natural language understanding (NLU).  It is true that Apple’s Siri and Google Voice work impressively on mobile devices held close to the mouth, but in the car, automotive grade systems optimized for the automotive environment and automotive use cases are best.

Learning and Personalization

VR suppliers are increasingly integrating abilities into the NLU systems that introduce learning capabilities.  A standout in this area is MeMeMe Mobile which personalizes speech recognition to the speaker for use within and beyond the car.

Application Focus

Drivers want a reliable VR solution for hands-free access to telephony, navigation (destination entry!) and audio.  All other functions in the car – such as HVAC – are best handled with other types of controls.  But appropriate integration of VR technology is key.  You may use voice to look up an audio track, but a manual control to increase the volume.

Reducing Distraction

Luxury cars are already reading text messages and emails and allowing drivers to respond in a hands-free or, preferred, an automated manner.  The influential California legislature has considered banning this type of functionality, but, if implemented properly and without legislative interference, such a capability could be a useful distraction mitigation tool.

JDP’s IQS study is an important bellwether for the automotive industry.  But let’s not forget that the perennially grumpy users responding to JDP’s study are using three-year-old technology.  Advances in automotive VR are closer than they may appear to be when looking at today’s new cars.