One of the most iconic and ultimately useful things that the Kinect brought with it to the table for Xbox was voice commands. While it sounds like it may be a novelty gimmick, its convenience cannot be understated, which is why voice commands became one of the most popular ways to interact with Xbox. Sony tried to jump aboard the trail with PlayStation 4 as well, allowing it to be voice controlled via either the PlayStation Camera microphone, or the headset microphone, but the voice commands are neither as thorough and extensive, nor as smooth, as they are on Xbox.
Well, Sony might be looking at changing that soon, if this new job listing is anything to go by. It appears that SCEA’s Research and Development Organization is looking for a senior level engineer to support its PSVR SDK development. It’s a very long job listing, so I will just put down the relevant parts here:
- To help handle/compile standard web based grammar support for multi-languages for voice recognition grammar and dictionary.
- To improve runtime voice recognition system level optimization (including CPU optimization) and sample voice applications for many languages, particularly for Japanese.
- To help improve voice recognition accuracy and out-of-vocabulary rejection rate for noisy speech, kid’s speech, and emotional speech with limited CPU and memory for multi languages.
Whether or not this has any tangible returns in the short run remains to be seen, of course.