Long Text Reading in a Car

We present here the results of a study focused on text reading in a car. The purpose of this work is to explore how machine synthesized reading is perceived by users. Are the users willing to tolerate deficiencies of machine synthesized speech and trade it off for more current content? What is the impact of listening to it on driver’s distraction? How do the answers to the questions above differ for various types of text content? Those are the questions we try to answer in the presented study. We conducted the study with 12 participants, each facing three types of tasks. The tasks differed in the length and structure of the presented text. Reading out a fable represented an unstructured pleasure reading text. The news represented more structured short texts. Browsing a car manual was an example of working with structured text where the user looks for particular information without much focusing on surrounding content. The results indicate relatively good user acceptance for the presented tasks. Distraction of the driver was related to the amount of interaction with the system. Users opted for controlling the system by buttons on the steering wheel and made little use of the system’s display.