You Should Have A Voice In GPS

The GPS Lodge featured this recently. I’m jumping on it because it is just that important, both from a safety and a freedom standpoint::

Spain Considers GPS Misuse Illegal

Wow in a bold move, Spain is considering making it illegal to use/type on a GPS system while driving. The fine would be €300 as well as three points removed from the driving license. Apparently the lawmakers said that navigation systems and interacting with/typing on them while driving can cause a distraction and that about half of car accidents are caused by driver distractions.
If this type of law gains momentum, expect voice recognition capabilities to become widespread… Read more at the GPS Lodge

I’ve cautioned about this driving distraction stuff here: I don’t know if anyone will listen. When I was involved with a major redesign of a large government GPS tracking system … where voice recognition wasn’t a possible option, I forced the software engineers to burn up a lot of hours (my program dollars) to design the interface so that a driver could acknowledge a text message with just the press of one large key on the mobile terminal … the space bar, and the screen the dispatchers used when sending messages would change color to alert them that when the driver was in motion so they wouldn’t send routine, non-essential messages until the driver was stopped. Seemed to make sense to me.

I also wrote about the hazards of cell phone texting while driving … suspected in this fatal accident. When I lived in Japan (gosh how time flies, that’s 10 years ago now) cell phones were much more sophisticated than the average American model even today … the US is back in the dust on cell phone use and development … but one feature I haven’t even heard of a manufacturer offering in the US was required on all phones. A one-key function that would switch the phone into an automatic “drive” mode. Text messages would not come in to the driver’s phone in that mode, they would be queued and be delivered when the phone was taken out of “Drive” mode by the subscriber. Voice calls would not ring through. The caller would get a message in Japanese and English … “I’m driving now, please leave a message”.

Driving is serious business. It’s also a leading cause of death … even more deadly, by far, than our nation’s wars. Voice recognition is not always easy, and perfect, but anyone who ever saw Windows 1.0 knows that software can evolve quickly. Are lives worth it, or would you rather have yet another law that costs money, is difficult if not impossible to enforce, and makes most of us scofflaws in one way or another.

Designers, manufacturers and consumers need to smarten up!