Speech interfaces in real-time control systems

Previous work has indicated that speech technologies may not offer an interface that is truly without costs in terms of the possible detrimental effects on performance of simultaneous visual-manual tasks. Original work manipulated the level of memory and attention required for the visual-manual task and found that as those demands increased so did the destructive interference between the visual-manual task and a concurrent speech input-voice output task. This paper reports conclusions from a series of pilot experiments carried out examining the nature of multi-modal task interference but varying the demand in relation to the speech task