Texting while driving is as big of a no-no as talking on the phone while driving, especially since both activities are distracting and could cause accidents. With the introduction of voice assistants, such as Siri and S Voice and etc. and their ability to convert voice to text, and text to voice and so on, logically it would seem like we might have found a safer alternative to reply and read text messages while driving, right? However a survey conducted by the Texas Transportation Institute thinks otherwise and believes that voice-to-text activities can dull reactions the same way texting while driving might.
In their study, they have found that drivers who use voice-to-text take twice as long to react when they weren’t trying to use their phone, and that eye contact to the road was also noticed to have decreased. The study also found out that voice-to-text actually took longer than manual input because drivers were busy trying to think of what to say as well. In a way this makes sense because in some cases, voice assistants can find it hard to detect certain accents and will get the message wrong, causing the user to either type it out manually, or re-do voice-to-text again. Not to mention the user will probably want to check to make sure the content is correct before sending it off. What do you guys think?