Conversational In-Vehicle Dialog Systems: The past, present, and future

Abstract

Automotive technology rapidly advances with increasing connectivity and automation. These advancements aim to assist safe driving and improve user travel experience. Before the realization of a full automation, in-vehicle dialog systems may reduce the driver distraction from many services available through connectivity. Even when a full automation is realized, in-vehicle dialog systems still play a special role in assisting vehicle occupants to perform various tasks. On the other hand, in-vehicle use cases need to address very different user conditions, environments, and industry requirements than other uses. This makes the development of effective and efficient in-vehicle dialog systems challenging; it requires multidisciplinary expertise in automatic speech recognition, spoken language understanding, dialog management (DM), natural language generation, and application management, as well as field system and safety testing. In this article, we review research and development (R&D) activities for in-vehicle dialog systems from both academic and industrial perspectives, examine findings, discuss key challenges, and share our visions for voice-enabled interaction and intelligent assistance for smart vehicles over the next decade.