Mobile-free driving with Android phones: System design and performance evaluation

Texting while driving is becoming a major problem in many countries worldwide, which if not handled properly can cause serious accidents. In this paper, we present our proposed system for a voiced based text messaging system utilizing Android phones empowered by Google voice recognition engine. We also present some of the software engineering challenges encountered during implementation. Utilizing our software, the user can issue voice commands to his mobile phone which in turn will send the text message on his behalf. Furthermore, we tested the performance of our system with different people that have different English accents, and under different background noise. Our performance analysis showed that there is a need to develop and enhance the current Google API voice recognition engine to better support people with different English accents. Moreover, the current APIs should allow the developer to add some signal processing functionalities to eliminate the effect of the background noise that the user may encounter while driving.