Speech and Skeletal Tracking in River Raid X

I’ve been experimenting with Speech SDK lately and was trying to find a way to control games with sounds. In this video, you can see me control River Raid X with Kinect skeletal tracking and voice.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/34110392 w=549&h=309]

Helper classes for both Speech SDK and NUI (Kinect Natural User Interface) are implemented in the latest changeset of Neat Game Engine’s source code. Implementing voice commands in games for simple tasks such as starting the game, pausing and resuming it, etc. is not a difficult task, because Speech SDK easily handles these stuff with Grammars and other classes. What’s really interesting in controlling games with sounds is finding a natural place for them inside games. Things like finding the position of the sound source in 3D and finding use for “meaningless” voices inside the game is what makes voice integration in games really fun.

I’ll keep on experimenting more with voice and speech in games and keep here updated!