It’s Good to Talk: How Speaking to Automation Will Improve Your Situation Awareness

Concerns about operators of complex and highly automated systems losing essential Situation Awareness and becoming “Out-Of-The-Loop” remains a current and ever more pressing concern with the promise of autonomous vehicles controlled by autonomous traffic control systems. Human Autonomy Teaming research proposes that to address this issue, human operators and managers of must have improved the communication with the autonomous agents of these systems. In this study we evaluated the impact of implementing a bi-directional audio-voice communication channel between a human and synthetic agent on the Situation Awareness and Performance of the human. We conducted an experimental study in which twenty-six participants teamed with a synthetic agent to complete a simulated dynamic traffic control task. The results of the study demonstrate that articulating commands including specific SA information assists with the transfer of implicit SA knowledge into explicit SA and show that both speaking and listening to the synthetic agent significantly improved participant SA. The results show that this change in SA was accompanied by a change is performance and decision-making behaviour, even when the audio-voice communication only provided “old” information readily available to the participant on the graphical display. Our conclusion drawn from the study is that “It’s good (for SA) to talk”.