Kotaku recently revealed that SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment America) added a job post on LinkedIn for a speech recognition engineering intern. His job will be to develop speech detection mechanism and voice signal processing in noisy situations. He will have to develop such a mechanism that would extract human voice form a noisy background and understand voice commands of different tone and pitch. The post does not explicitly mention that the speech recognition will be developed for which Sony’s product but it is expected that it will be developed for PS4.
It seems like Sony’s upcoming gaming roster PS4 will understand voice commands. It will be and interesting stuff to see. It has already been confirmed that the upcoming PS4 will have a PlayStation Eye camera that will have a four channel microphone array with it. So there is also a chance that the voice recognition feature may find its way into the PlayStation Eye Camera. But the chances of this thing to happen are very few. The Sony’s competitor in gaming, Microsoft has already pushed for voice recognition feature with Kinect on the Xbox One. The speech recognition in Xbox One will still be limited in several ways. The Verge says that the upcoming Xbox will have the ability to do perform speech-to-text conversion and understand natural language controls. The Sony will never want their PS4 to be lagged in features from Xbox One. So the chances for PS4 to have voice recognition are quite strong.
The voice recognition feature in electronic gadgets is not a new feature. Even the early mobiles had this sort of feature in them. Some of the early gaming hardware allowed the user to control the game by shouting commands like fire, move and stop. The low efficiency of voice recognition mechanism due to noise and different voice and pitch of the users always limited the use of this technology in gaming hardware and such sort of feature was never readily appreciated by the users. So, if Sony is going to include a voice control feature in their PS4, then it has to be efficient and more dynamic. It should allow the gamer to interact with the PS4 more effectively.
The release date of PS4 has not yet been confirmed by it is likely to be released by the end of this year. Only the final release of the PS4 and experience of the customers will tell that whether the voice recognition feature in PS4 proved to be fruitful or not.
