Nintendo considering speech recognition for Wii

Nintendo is considering implementing speech recognition technology into Wii games, according to the company´s middleware developer Takeshi Shimada. NintendoWorldReport has attended a GDC session hosted by him and summarize the contents of his speech:

He highlighted a development tool called NintendoWare, developed by Nintendo and HAL, that emulates Wii hardware on the PC so that artists can view an accurate representation of their special effects without loading their code onto a Wii development kit. He also noted that his group is working on easy-to-incorporate fur-shading middleware and predictive input (so the game can guess what you're about to do based on prior motion). NCL is also looking into the utility of text-to-speech for Wii.

There have been both rumours and patents suggesting some kind of speech recognition and conversion technology in the past. Taken alongside the recent microphone rumour below, this makes perfect sense.

Source: NintendoWorldReport
Thanks to: Kairon, Ziran