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Konami's Lifeline Goes Voice All The Way
Mechanik writes "A new CNN article details Konami's new PlayStation 2 game LifeLine, which has a very interesting twist on control schemes. The piece explains: 'Unlike some other games, voice commands in 'LifeLine' are not optional -- they're the only way to control the action. With the help of a USB headset... you talk to characters and they respond by following your commands and/or answering your questions.' Apparently, the developers know just how we gamer geeks think too... 'Of course, if you have a virtual hottie like Rio at the center of an action game, some players will try to command her to do more than just run and shoot. 'I love you,' 'Take your clothes off,' 'What's your sign?' We have responses for most of those,' [the developer] says'." This title has only had a couple of reviews thus far, although they seem to paint it as a flawed experiment.
how well will this game work for someone with a heavy accent, speech impediments, stuttering, etc? it'd be interesting if they programmed for this scenario...
Playing Lifeline is like trying to play a text adventure with a malfunctioning keyboard - Gamespy
Seems to me like a very true statement.
As some other people have pointed out, this technology has been tried before (Seaman). But the post further gets it wrong with the idea that it's a "new" game -- as the article mentions, Lifeline is the US localization of an existing Japanese game.
The original game was called "Operator's Side" and was released over a year ago in Japan, where it did well enough to go to a "PlayStation 2 the Best" Release within 8 months.
Linguistically speaking, voice-rec may be easier to do in Japanese. Japanese has a very regular syllabic structure, consisting almost entirely of open syllables, with long syllables composed of shorter ones.
Japanese cellular phones have had voice recognition based on breaking down words for a long time, and it was only natural that the tech find its way into games. For example, if you input the word "sakura", it would be parsed as "sa" "ku" "ra", instead of compared outright to the waveform of entire words.
Now what would be really interesting to see this sort of game software used in a language learning environment... It would also be interesting to play a Japanese game that for once requires spoken fluency in Japanese instead of written!!