Speech Heads, mark down another tick in the distrubingly thick book of Awful Things That More People Than You Would Think Do While They Drive.

A recently released Vlingo-commissioned study executed by Toluna found that 26 percent of U.S. drivers willingly admit to driving while texting (DWT, Vlingo calls it), despite bans, and despite reports of sickening, face-smashing, hellfire accident reports about hapless souls who texted behind the wheel.

According to l’Agence France-Presse, which reported on the Vlingo study, “Last year, authorities in Los Angeles said the conductor of a train involved in a rail crash that left 25 people dead was sending text messages on his mobile phone during working hours.”

No indication if “during working hours” means while he was supposed to be conducting his train.

The Vlingo study maintains that Tennessee is the worst offender in the Union. A whopping 42 percent of Tennesseans distractedly TXT things to their contacts like lolz! can’t wait to c u 2nite while operating a motor vehicle.

Arizona had the lowest reported incidence with only 18 percent, making them more conscientious drivers or just better liars.

Age-wise, 60 percent of 16 to 19 year-olds admit to DWT, while 49 percent of 20 to 24 year-olds proffered their own confessions. Numbers drop off as age increases. Only 13 percent of respondents in their 50s came forward with admissions of DWT-guilt

The incidence of DWT coincides with an overall rise in text messaging. The study found that two thirds of Americans are now texting, up from a little more than half last year.

Perhaps hypocritically, 83 percent of respondents said that DWT should be illegal—-despite many doing it in places where it is illegal like D.C. (the number for D.C. must be higher than 18 percent according to Vlingo’s findings).

The report goes on to point out that though most people think it should be illegal, it is only illegal in seven states and in one of them, Rhode Island, only for drivers under the age of 18—-a subtextual push for political reform?

It’s not hard to see how these results would favor a company in the business of doing voice-to-text work and voice search work. A total ban on DWT, which exceptions for speech-driven iterations, would be a great boon to the company as well as others like it.

As me, I would just feel safer if there was a ban on my brother Adam B. driving—-speech enabled or not.

I originally interviewed Mike Wehrs, Nuance’s vice president of evangelism and industry affairs for an FYI about vSearch in the July/Aug issue of Speech Technology Magazine.

Unfortunately, the time crunch was such that we weren’t able to slot the quotes into the story.

(Editor: You really need to meet your deadlines.

Ryan: I’ll work on that later.)

Mike gave some substantive quotes, however, and since it can’t get into the magazine proper, the blog is a good forum to host the interview transcript. Read it after the jump.

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James Larson, Ph.D., is co-program chair for the SpeechTEK 2008 Conference, co-chair of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Voice Browser Working Group, and author of the home-study guide The VoiceXML Guide. He can be reached at jim@larson-tech.com. He was kind enough to submit some thoughts on the recent Voice Search Conference in San Diego.

1. Voice search can be defined as (a) using voice to search text information, and (b) using voice to search voice information. There was little discussion the second type of voice search. There were many talks about the first type of voice search, especially for directory assistance, customer info lookup, and music “jukebox” applications.

2. While much of the conference dealt with voice search, several sessions addressed other speech technology topics. For example, 5. The folks form Spoken talked about Secret Agents. A secret agent is a human who monitors several ongoing IVR dialogs. The agent is notified when the speech recognition engine fails to understand what the user said. The user’s utterance is replayed to the agent, who selects the appropriate word from the grammar, or causes the dialog to transfer to a regular human agent. The overall effect to the user is the dialog works better.

I note that AT&T did this some time ago for directory assistance calls.

The goal of secret agents is to contain the user within the automated IVR system. As we saw from Paul English and the gethuman.com web site, users hate containment, especially if they have a difficult request that they feel can only be handled by a live agent. I wonder how these users will feel if they knew that a secret agent is listening to them but is not allowed to speak directly with them.

3. Mike Phillips, Vlingo, has a nice demonstration for accessing textual data by voice. Vlingo has done a lot of usability testing, and it shows when you use the UI, which I think is very good. Check out the UI by going to http://www.vlingo.com/ and clicking “watch the demo.”

4. Three hot topics of discussion were:

(1) multimodal user interfaces

(2) analytics

(3) video and voice dialog. Most conversations delt with how cool these new technologies were and how to make money using them.

5. I had a chat with David Thomson, who gave a talk about how phones can be used in social web sites. We see opportunities for speech technology in social web sites:

(1) Provide simple authoring tools so teen can create speech dialogs to their portrayed personas.

(2) Viewers could call a phone number and leave messages, which could be converted to text by general purpose dictation recognition.

(3) The virtual equivalent of an answering machine that could accept VoIP calls, filter them, and route them according to instructions by the social web site owner. I think there are many opportunities for speech technologies in social web sites.