“A widely publicized study that reported that voice assistants like Apple’s Siri aren’t any safer than manually texting while driving failed to test Siri as it was actually designed to be used in its distracted driving experiment,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.
“The study, conducted by Texas A&M Transportation Institute, noted that drivers on a closed course holding a smartphone in one hand while interacting with Siri (or Vlingo, a similar service for Android smartphones) took nearly twice as long to respond to an external testing event,” Dilger reports. “The study’s author Christine Yager subsequently concluded that voice-to-text services ‘”do not increase driver safety compared to manual texting.'”
Dilger reports, “In response to the experiment, a report by Xconomy noted that the study was flawed because the way Siri was tested is not how it is intended to be used.”
Read more in the full article here.
Wade Roush reports for Xconomy, “Adam Cheyer, the computer scientist who co-invented Siri and sold it to Apple in 2010… [said], ‘I don’t think that there is any evidence that shows that if Siri and other systems are used properly in eyes-free mode, they are ‘just as risky as texting.'”
“The crucial phrase in Cheyer’s quote is ‘eyes-free mode,'” Roush reports. “When a driver is using Siri with a Bluetooth headset or speaker—as Apple recommends—the app goes into a special mode that limits interactions to voice only. ‘It assumes you are ‘eyes-busy’ and responds differently,’ says Cheyer, who left Apple in 2012.”
Roush reports, “‘My goal is not to knock this particular study,’ Cheyer says. ‘I’m just dismayed that the message being communicated by news media—that ‘Siri is just as risky as texting’—is misleading.’ … The TTI study shows only that ‘non-eyes-free voice input is not a significant win over non-eyes-free manual texting,’ he says. ‘This is the message that should be transmitted to people.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The majority of the media blows it. So, who’s surprised?
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