Speech-to-whimsically-colored-text

This is all well and good, but I hope they still allow regular voice chat as well cause if i'm playing with friends, I don't want to have to read what they say.

the benefits of text over voice as described by the patent:

[0009] While voice chat has been widely adopted in the gaming community and has achieved a fair degree of success, text chat is still being used by some because of several advantages it provides over voice chat. Communicating with other online players in massive multiplayer online role playing games, for example, is still often provided by text chat rather than voice chat. Text chat provides a record of conversations so that players can review exactly what was said by other players, and also provides the ability to easily identify the player who sent a particular message (text can be tagged with a speaker's identity). In addition, using text chat, one player's statements can be easily separated from another player's statements since the text typically appears separately (this can also be done with voice chat using a half-duplex type communications system, but this might be somewhat frustrating to the speakers). Additionally, unlike most voice chat, text chat provides the ability to mask the player's true identity. This can be useful when the game play includes avatars that in effect provide an "alter ego" for each human player. For example, if a 12 year old boy is playing the role of a 40 year old warrior, voice chat can spoil or detract from the game play experience since the warrior ends up having the voice of a 12 year old. Additional advantages of text chat include the ability to monitor and censor player conversations for bad language, and reduction in the amount of bandwidth required to convey the information.

[0010] Despite the continued usefulness of text chat in some game play contexts, using the keyboard continues to have significant disadvantages, especially for console or other game platforms that do not include keyboards. A keyboard is a bulky accessory, and it detracts from game play if the user has to remove his hands from the controller to type a message. The impersonation problem with voice chat can be addressed by providing voice filters that alter the sound of a player's voice, but so far players have not generally been using such voice masking since the resulting sound quality can be relatively low and intelligibility ends up being sacrificed.

I like the idea fully, and hopefully this will be in the DS's future, too.

...and maybe in blog comments? (color pink for sarcasm)

.ed

NEIL FALLON FROM CLUTCH, I F**KING LOVE YOU JASON!

(Hint, listen to Clutch, they rock)

Alex ~ the gearhead

Couldn't the voice to text be used only for filtering purposes? With a delay setup in place, it gives the machine enough time to process the words, insert any "bleeps" as necessary, while still have the actual words come across as audio rather than text?

Would be kind of neat, you could customize the speech recognition to replace your words with custom sounds, etc.

Then again, people could always get around that I suppose by saying a variation of a word...and the accuracy would have to be pretty good.

I like the idea Sean. I don't see why Nintendo couldn't do that.

Here's the link to the forum post: http://boards.ign.com/nintendo_wii_general_board/b8263/124568835/p1/?90

Looks fairly legit.

This could be very useful for any number of situations. The neatest possibility I've seen is using this to create word bubbles over your characters in Animal Crossing.

This could be very useful for any number of situations. The neatest possibility I've seen is using this to create word bubbles over your characters in Animal Crossing when you are playing online.

Stop me if I'm wrong, but couldn't this be an incredibly valuable technique to unite international gamers? If you're doing speech-to-text surely you can do translation at the same time?