Natural speech next challenge for Kinect

The next challenge for Kinect will be making it recognise natural speech.

This is according to Rare engineer David Quinn, who said the studio is working on ways to make Kinect understand ‘natural conversation’.

Quinn told Gamasutra: “We pushed speech pretty hard in Sports 2, but it was also a very say-what-you-see approach; in golf, you change clubs [by saying] ‘four iron’, kind of thing.

“What I’d like to see and what we’re investigating now is a more natural conversation way of talking to the Kinect, so you can say, ‘Hey, caddy, give me a five iron,’ or ‘Hey, caddy, what should I use now?’”

Quinn said he was a fan of the way Mass Effect 3 implemented voice commands.

He added: “What Mass Effect had recently done with Kinect’s speech system is an excellent use of speech.

“What the Mass Effect guys have done is bring it into a core title, showing it could be used with a controller. It doesn’t have to be the ‘get up and dance’ kind of experience.

“You can use speech in Kinect in a more core title, and it really demonstrated that. I think from here on in you’ll see a lot of speech in core games.”