ScanSoft's speech reco enhances Nintendo's GameCube

Here's an interesting announcement that came today from ScanSoft. Nintendo has incorporated ScanSoft's speech technology into the Mario Party 6 video game. One notable and necessary feature is that the acoustic models have been trained with children speakers.

If speech reco in video games were to become more common, it will be interesting to see the overall impact in the future in terms of the utility of speech technology in everyday applications. For example, if kids grow up accustomed to talking machine, it seems they will more easily accomodate the limitations in speech recognition technology. For example, watch the typical user in their 60s use a mouse/keyboard to accomplish a task with a computer, and then watch a teenager carry out the same task. Same technology, same user interface, but the teenager will typically be more adept in interacting with the machine, as they've been using the technology in their early formative years, likely before they even learned to read an write!

Read the entire press release.