Distracted Driving Awareness Month is almost at an end, but new revelations about practices behind the wheel continue to come to light. The latest updates are courtesy of a study from the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University, which found that drivers who use voice-to-text tools instead of traditional texting lose just as much focus when driving as their counterparts texting traditionally. <\/p>\n
Results from the study showed that, in each case, drivers took about twice as long to react to a situation as they did when they were driving with no distractions. In fact, using voice-to-text tools took even longer than regular texting, as drivers often had to correct mistakes in translation, which kept their eyes off the road for an even greater amount of time. <\/p>\n
"You're still using your mind to try to think of what you're trying to say, and that by proxy causes some driving impairment, and that decreases your response time," Christina Yager, the study's author, told Reuters. "… Every day, new technologies come out, and it is important to educate the public that even these seemingly new distractions are still distractions, and it will help people be safer when they get into the vehicle." <\/p>\n