The continuous development of in-vehicle information systems in recent years has dramatically enriched drivers’ driving experience while occupying their cognitive resources to varying degrees, causing driving distraction. Under this complex information system, managing the complexity and priority of information and further improvement in driving safety has become a key issue that needs to be urgently solved by the in-vehicle information system. The new interactive methods incorporating the augmented reality (AR) and head-up display (HUD) technologies into in-vehicle information systems are currently receiving widespread attention. This superimposes various onboard information into an actual driving scene, thereby meeting the needs of complex tasks and improving driving safety. Based on the qualitative research methods of surveys and telephone interviews, this study collects the information needs of the target user groups (i.e., beginners and skilled drivers) and constructs a three-mode information database to provide the basis for a customized AR-HUD interface design.

Voice user interface has become a commercially viable and extensive interaction mechanism with the development of voice assistants. Despite the popularity of voice assistants, the academic community does not utterly understand about what, when, and how users chat with them. Chatting with a voice assistant is crucial as it defines how a user will seek the help of the assistant in the future. This study aims to cover the essence and construct of conversational AI, to develop a classification method to deal with user utterances, and, most importantly, to understand about what, when, and how Chinese users chat with voice assistants. We collected user utterances from the real conventional database of a commercial voice assistant, NetEase Sing in China. We also identified different utterance categories on the basis of previous studies and real usage conditions and annotated the utterances with 17 labels. Furthermore, we found that the three top reasons for the usage of voice assistants in China are the following: (1) greeting, (2) function, and (3) music. Chinese users like to interact with voice assistants at night from 7 PM to 10 PM, and they are polite toward the assistants. The whole percentage of negative feedback utterances is less than 6%, which is considerably low. These findings appear to be useful in voice interaction designs for intelligent hardware.