What does this research mean for the field?

AI uncertainty in assistive navigation can be implicitly communicated through auditory prosodic cues such as tone, pacing, and emphasis, allowing users to gauge system confidence without disrupting task flow. Novelty: ClaimNovelty.METHODOLOGICAL. Consensus alignment: ConsensusAlignment.NEUTRAL.

What question did this study set out to answer?

To develop an uncertainty-aware assistive navigation system that communicates AI confidence through speech modulation during real-time scene descriptions.

September 2, 2026Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting

Communicating AI Uncertainty in Assistive Navigation for People with Visual Impairments

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To develop an uncertainty-aware assistive navigation system that communicates AI confidence through speech modulation during real-time scene descriptions.
Engineered an assistive navigation architecture combining a real-time collision-warning module with an LLM-driven semantic reasoning layer.
Mapped token-level LLM uncertainty to auditory prosodic variations (tone, pacing, emphasis) instead of explicit confidence statements.
The prototype successfully translates model uncertainty into perceptible acoustic variations, allowing users to implicitly assess system confidence during ongoing tasks.
The system demonstrates that AI confidence can function as a human-factors design feature to aid trust calibration without interrupting real-time navigation.

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Implication

Prototype design study demonstrates prosody-based AI uncertainty communication in assistive navigation, suggesting auditory cues improve trust calibration without disrupting navigational flow.

Cite This Study

Shaffer et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a97e237c562ede874ec6464 https://doi.org/10.1177/10711813261484587

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Implication

Prototype design study demonstrates prosody-based AI uncertainty communication in assistive navigation, suggesting auditory cues improve trust calibration without disrupting navigational flow.

Communicating AI Uncertainty in Assistive Navigation for People with Visual Impairments

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Discussion

Implication

Cite This Study

Communicating AI Uncertainty in Assistive Navigation for People with Visual Impairments

Key Points

Discussion

Implication

Cite This Study

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