Tuesday 15 August 2006
Nintendo Wii and DS games could soon feature an intriguing voice-recognition system that can read and analyse your speech.
Analysed text can be displayed as text on other players' consoles during multiplayer games with the tone of your voice altering the colour, size and font of the text, according to a US patent held by Nintendo.
As you speak, the system picks up on your voice pattern - shout "I WIN!" and it will appear in big red capital letters; whisper and it'll be much smaller and in a more subdued colour. The patent, issued in February, has surfaced after an IGN forumite claimed to know of Nintendo's plans to use a system called 'voice-to-text communication' in its games.
It's unclear whether these plans are primarily for Wii games, but the forum poster also claims that "some peripherals for DS will be compatible with Wii and vice versa," suggesting good compatibility between the two consoles.
We'll be chasing up Nintendo for an official response but until they respond why not check out the patent listing for yourself.
