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Voice technology is undoubtedly the preferred input method as the mobile web evolves.  The gaming industry will certainly be the leading edge in this evolution.  Now Tom Clancy’s Endwar from Ubisoft Shanghai demonstrates a robust example of what is possible.

The developer, Ubisoft Shanghai, has cheated a little though. Rather than use the software to recognize actual words, it is used to recognize the sounds that make up those words – the system used looks out for particular sounds that go to make up a word. This cunningly gets around the need for a large amount of training generally required with standard speech recognition software, and also gets around the problem of accents: the main sounds of a word are essentially the same, regardless of your accent. The problem has been simplified even further by only recognizing a handful of words – about eighty or ninety, according to Ubisoft.

Overall the review is basically positive, although there are some reservations:

Tom Clancy’s Endwar has an innovative control method which works surprisingly well; and it has a storyline that is both interesting and pertinent to today’s events. The voice control works excellently, but it works so well because it has a limited range of understanding, and this in turn limits other parts of the game.

For more information about the game there is a paperback, Tom Clancy’s EndWar. Although this may be a work in progress for voice technology, it would seem to be a most promising start, particularly in getting over those accents.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Voice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.