How to integrate speech-operated internet information dialogs into a car

Telematics and entertainment systems in cars usually contain audio, phone and navigation functions that rely mostly on static content. The Human Machine Interface (HMI), including the speech dialog system, reflects these static applications by their very restricted dialogs. In the future the driver would like to access current information from the internet to provide driving assistance and information of personal interest. The HMI should allow the user to request information by voice, in order to keep distraction minimal. This paper presents three architectural approaches to obtain current internet information in a car, link it to the existing applications, and make them available for speech input with as few hardware and software changes as possible to the existing system. We propose speech applications broadcast by digital radio, speech access to web services and a complete server-based processing architecture. The prototype dialog system for all three architectures was jointly developed with Siemens AG, the DFKI and Fraunhofer FIRST in the SmartWeb project.