measured_times_for_voice_control_efficiency_study

Cars, mobile phones, and smart home devices already provide automatic speech recognition (ASR) by default. However, human machine interfaces (HMI) in industrial settings, as opposed to consumer settings, operate under different conditions and thus, present different design challenges. Voice control, arguably the most natural form of communication, has the potential to shorten complex command sequences and menu structures in order to directly execute a final command. Therefore, this contribution explored how differing HMI scenarios could possibly be optimized, by either replacing or complementing existing touch control interactions with voice control. Typical machine commands from CNC milling machines and industrial robots were categorized by their complexity, quantified by menu level and the necessary number of interactions. The collected interaction data showed that voice control can already provide a time efficiency advantage at either one additional menu level or three touchscreen interactions. For complex machine commands, such as those needing five menu levels and seven interactions on the touchscreen, the time efficiency advantage of voice control can reach up to 67 %. Furthermore, the study shows the possibility of reducing machine operator training times when using voice control by significantly lower interaction times for the first repetition of the participants.