Thinking of voice-activation in a car in lieu of analog manual controls misses the point - perhaps you weren't advocating for it as a replacement, but the article above seems to.
There are multiple points of failures for a voice-control only interface for a high-speed moving vehicle:
1. Problems with NLP, and needing to adjust oneself to the proprietary format of this particular car's voice recognition grammar/syntax/parsing/etc. (discussed elsewhere in this thread)
2. Loud location (driving by a jackhammer)
3. Female voices [1]
4. AAVE voices [2]
5. Immigrant voices [1]
Some argument can be made that 3-5 could be improved on with larger training sets. Given that we're still working off of much of the same recording equipment that we developed in the early 20th century, this is only true up to a point in regards to #3, since it's difficult to calibrate higher pitched "noise" out and keep higher pitched voices in when they're at a similar range.
Even assuming all the above problems are solved, there are still the cases of someone losing their voice temporarily due to illness, or someone speech-disabled but otherwise able-bodied, and the cases of a computer malfunction in the car itself that causes voice recognition to break. I was in such an incident myself quite recently, where a rented Mini Cooper's onboard computer made it appear that the engine was overheating (red hot engine symbol) and that I must cease driving immediately lest the car explodes. After the car was off, the computer malfunctioned so severely that attempting to turn the car on only resulted in a light-up display of every error message the car had.
All that to say - voice controls are not a suitable replacement for standard knobs and dials, and the latter should always be available as a reliable back-up method for operating a car.
There are multiple points of failures for a voice-control only interface for a high-speed moving vehicle:
1. Problems with NLP, and needing to adjust oneself to the proprietary format of this particular car's voice recognition grammar/syntax/parsing/etc. (discussed elsewhere in this thread)
2. Loud location (driving by a jackhammer)
3. Female voices [1]
4. AAVE voices [2]
5. Immigrant voices [1]
Some argument can be made that 3-5 could be improved on with larger training sets. Given that we're still working off of much of the same recording equipment that we developed in the early 20th century, this is only true up to a point in regards to #3, since it's difficult to calibrate higher pitched "noise" out and keep higher pitched voices in when they're at a similar range.
Even assuming all the above problems are solved, there are still the cases of someone losing their voice temporarily due to illness, or someone speech-disabled but otherwise able-bodied, and the cases of a computer malfunction in the car itself that causes voice recognition to break. I was in such an incident myself quite recently, where a rented Mini Cooper's onboard computer made it appear that the engine was overheating (red hot engine symbol) and that I must cease driving immediately lest the car explodes. After the car was off, the computer malfunctioned so severely that attempting to turn the car on only resulted in a light-up display of every error message the car had.
All that to say - voice controls are not a suitable replacement for standard knobs and dials, and the latter should always be available as a reliable back-up method for operating a car.
[1] - https://hbr.org/2019/05/voice-recognition-still-has-signific... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...