Mass Effect 3 voice commands point to new frontier, says Rare engineer David Quinn
The next big challenge for Kinect developers is natural speech, says Rare engineer David Quinn.
Quinn has been working on Kinect "almost since the beginning," and since that time has been instrumental in the Kinect Sports titles.
"We pushed speech pretty hard in Sports 2," he told Gamasutra.
"There was speech in the first round of launch titles- Kinectimals obviously had speech. But from day one the entire UI was gonna be speech-driven. Every game event had to have speech incorporated into it."
But this was a limited approach, and Quinn wants to see speech incorporated in more natural, fluid ways.
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"But it was also a very say-what-you-see approach; in golf, you change clubs- 'four iron,' - kind of thing," he explained.
"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?'"
Speech is particularly important because of the popularity of core titles like Mass Effect 3 and Skyrim taking advantage of Kinect voice commands.
"What Mass Effect had recently done with Kinect's speech system is an excellent use of speech," said Quinn, who expects more core titles to use Kinect in the near future.
"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."
The thing that irks me about this, and was very much evident in Microsoft's recent E3 conference, Kinect is becoming a speech recognition device and losing it's body-tracking focus. That's fine, it didn't work and the speech does (well enough at least).
At this point though, as the speech is a fully-software driven solution, why does anyone still need to buy the $130 peripheral? Why can't we just use a reasonable quality microphone instead? The hardware is offering us nothing at this point and become less important as time goes on, but Microsoft continue to push "Kinect" as though it is actually speech recognition, it's not, it's software.
@CukyDoh... I agree you see a large push towards the voice recognition. First... the microphone and optical combo of the kinect is better than most in the industry. I think the other thing is MS is pushing core titles to use the Kinect but players of these titles don't want to give up their control based functionality. For example - Splinter Cell, Halo, call of duty players don't want input lag, or trying to remember what motion does what, when playing in multiplayer games, especially at a competitive level. I think it will require a balance as we move forward between just voice and a combo.
