paying as much attention to the car ahead of you, or to the cyclist in the bike lane next to you. In studies performed in simulators at Clemson University and reported this January, drivers who were texting were 10 percent more likely to cross the road’s center line or to leave their lanes entirely.
Asked whether there should be laws against sending text messages while driving, 78.4 percent of respondents said yes. That’s an interesting statistic, considering that 28 percent of people said they drive and text at least occasionally. Even assuming the lowest possible overlap between these groups, at least 6 percent of the people surveyed regularly do something they think should be illegal. Just as interesting, 85 percent of people said they would not DWT if it were illegal—implying that 15 percent still might.
Such questions may not be theoretical for much longer: texting behind the wheel is already illegal in Washington, and some 23 other states are considering outlawing the practice. But such laws will do nothing to change people’s underlying motivations—and in the case of texting, they’re apparently highly motivated to stay in touch with their friends and family members, whether traveling at 0 mph or 60 mph.
That’s part of the reason Vlingo is working on a technological fix for the DWT problem. “Our corporate view is that the world would probably be safer if no one talked on a cell phone while driving, or ate, or drank, or put on makeup for that matter,” says Grannan. “But the fact is that people will do these things. And when it comes to texting on a phone, if people are going to do it, it’s probably better if they can do it hands-free, using their voice.”
Grannan says Vlingo, which recently cut a deal to become the sole provider of speech-driven mobile search software for Yahoo, is hard at work on beta tests of a voice-based messaging application for mobile phones, and that the company’s first commercial products in this area will be available this summer. He isn’t ready to talk about the details. But he says the application will “combine text messaging and e-mail—you will have the ability to just speak and have your words translated into a text message or e-mail message.”
Vlingo would be far from the first company to roll out a speech-to-text application for e-mail—dictation software like Dragon Naturally Speaking from Burlington, MA-based Nuance has been doing that for years. But Vlingo could be one of the first to come up with a mobile equivalent—likely by relying on the same combination of device-based software and server-side machine-learning algorithms that the company uses to process unrestricted speech into intelligible search queries.
Vlingo did not miss out on the opportunity to test the idea on survey participants. Researchers asked the respondents who already use text messaging: “If you were able to speak into your phone and have your words translated into the body of a text message, how would this affect the amount of text messages you send?” About 27 percent of respondents answered that they’d send the same number of messages, 20 percent said they’d send a few more text messages, and 28 percent said they’d send many more. For cellular providers and their software companies they partner with, that’s got to be a welcome message.
