Sorry Siri: Hands-Free Systems are Dangerously Distracting

This is not good timing for Apple. Following the company's announcement at the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday that Siri, the voice-activated assistant on their new iOS 7, will be integrated into the dashboards of many new cars, the American Automobile Association (AAA) announced on Wednesday a new study showing that hands-free mobile systems in cars pose just as much of a safety risk, if not more so, than gadgets that take drivers' eyes off the road. 

Siri, and a version of iOS for the car, is headed to a dozen automakers' dashboards and will be baked into their "infotainment" systems starting in 2014, according to GottaBeMobile. Drivers will be able to play music, make phone calls, get directions, and send or receive messages, all without taking their eyes off the road.

Too bad that's exactly the kind of activity that poses "a looming public safety crisis," according to Robert Darbelnet, CEO of AAA, which partnered with the University of Utah to carry out an exhaustive study of hands-free activities behind the wheel and the cognitive impairment they cause. The study, released Wednesday by AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, found that hands-free driving systems cause cognitive distraction by suppressing brain activity in areas crucial for driving, increasing reaction time for things like braking, decreasing accuracy by causing missed cues in peripheral vision, and decreased subjects' visual scanning of their environment while driving.

Overall, drivers who used speech to text systems — such as the Siri messaging system that Apple wants to put in a dozen manufacturers' dashboards — recorded the highest levels of cognitive distraction. Other speech interaction systems already exists in several cars, from luxury models to low-cost compacts, and many more cars already feature in-car calling and hands-free interactions with music systems.

The study was led by David Strayer, neuroscientist at the University of Utah, whose research has previously shown that talking on a phone while driving creates the same level of crash risk as someone driving at the legally intoxicated blood-alcohol level. In the current study of hands-free mobile systems in cars, Strayer and his researchers used three scenarios to test the cognitive impairment caused by various hands-free activities, measuring brainwave activity, head and eye movements, peripheral vision, and reaction time. The first was a lab situation to get a baseline readings from the EEG cap and other measurement devices. Then subjects were tested in a driving simulation and on the road.

The test measured six common tasks: listening to the radio, listening to an audio book, having a conversation with a passenger, holding a phone while talking, having hands-free phone conversations, and using a speech to text system. These were measured against a maximum cognitive distraction level that involved completing complicated math and verbal tasks, which is labled OSPAN on the graph. As you see on the graph, basically the only thing more distracting for drivers than using speech to text is if they were to take the SATs while getting from point A to point B.

"These new, speech-based technologies in the car can overload the driver's attention and impair their ability to drive safely," said David Strayer to NPR.  "Don't assume that if your eyes are on the road and your hands are on the wheel that you are unimpaired." 

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers says it's concerned, but wants to see a more "complete body of research" on the subject, according to the NPR report. "We are concerned about any study that suggests that hand-held phones are comparably risky to the hands-free systems we are putting in our vehicles," said Gloria Bergquist, Vice President for Public Affairs at the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers to the New York Times. The Times says that, according to IMS Research, more than half of all new cars will have voice recognition software by the end of the decade. Apple's system, featuring, at least currently, voice to text messaging, is supposed to be available next year.