Multi-modal Interaction Between Pilots and Avionic Systems On-Board Large Commercial Aircraft

A lot of work has been carried out over the last decade to apply touchscreen technology to the flight deck of large commercial passenger aircraft. In fact, several industry solutions are now available and aircraft equipped with touchscreen solutions will be flying in the very near future. In contrast, Direct Voice Input (DVI) technology is still several years away from entering commercial service on large transport aircraft; nevertheless, it has a lot of potential and can even overcome some of the limitations associated with touchscreen technology. This paper presents a prototype application based on DVI which enables pilots to interact with the autopilot by means of voice commands. This application is composed of a speaker dependent speech recognition module and a command recognition module. The results of an evaluation of the DVI application are presented and discussed in detail and areas of improvement are outlined. The DVI application is part of a bigger solution which is intended to combine the benefits of touchscreen technology and DVI into a single multimodal interface.