2015/10/07 HMI Usage and Satisfaction: Speech Recognition Usage Increasing in the US and China

Consumer Satisfaction with Touchscreens on the Rise as Well 

Boston, MA – October 06, 2015 – OEMs continue to search for the right combination of human machine interface (HMI) options for consumers to safely and easily access infotainment features while driving. Speech recognition has been slowly evolving over the past two decades but has yet to achieve its potential of providing a hassle-free and safe interface. Touchscreens have also become more prominent with the ubiquity of smartphones but issues with vehicle integration, safety, and long development times have resulted in touchscreen systems that appear dated upon release.

A new report from the In-vehicle UX (IVX) group at Strategy Analytics (www.strategyanalytics.com) has investigated speech recognition and touchscreen satisfaction of consumers in the US, Western Europe, and China. While touchscreen user experience has improved since overcoming lags, freezes, and crashes that were all-too-frequent in some earlier systems, speech recognition usage had stagnated; but vehicles are now being released with more flexible and natural grammar.

Developments in speech recognition have resulted in consumers having an overall better experience, increasing usage and satisfaction for users in the US and China. Touchscreens have also improved with displays that are less prone to smudging; consumer satisfaction with touchscreens increased in all three regions evaluated. However, the addition of new features – particularly connected features – provides a challenge for touchscreens as they are not well-suited to handling complex tasks. Menu and feature complexities have been particularly hard to implement.

Click here for report: http://bit.ly/1KcXrRT  

Chris Schreiner, Director, User Experience Innovation Practice (UXIP) and report author commented, “As Siri, Google Voice, and others, have brought greater awareness to speech recognition on mobile devices, it has taken awhile for that to translate into increased usage in the vehicle given development timelines and the difficult and noisy in-vehicle environment.”

Kevin Nolan, VP, UXIP added, “While we have seen increases in speech recognition usage in the US and China, there is still much room for improvement, as less than a third of consumers who have this functionality in their vehicle use it every day in the US. In Western Europe, there is still stagnation around both usage and satisfaction.”
Source: Strategy Analytics