ScanSoft, the Speech Provider for Konami's "LifeLine" and
Sony's "SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs", to Host Tutorial on Creating Truly Interactive Gaming Experiences with Speech
ScanSoft to offer insight into enhanced game play and successful speech implementations
for Sony, Vivendi and Ubisoft at next week's Games Developers Conference
PEABODY, Mass., March 18, 2003 - ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT), the leading supplier of speech and imaging solutions, will be a featured speaker at the 2004 Games Developers Conference (GDC), being held from March 22-26, 2004 at the San Jose Convention Center. ScanSoft, the speech technology provider for Konami's "LifeLine", Sony's "SOCOM I & II: U.S. Navy SEALs", and other popular gaming titles, will present a tutorial on speech recognition for games on Wednesday, March 24, from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. PST in Room C-1.
The tutorial will offer insights into speech recognition capabilities for the gaming environment, including the numerous ways it can enhance game play and incorporate a new form of interaction with game characters and new features into games. The session leverages ScanSoft's expertise in deploying speech recognition on game consoles.
"Speech technology continues to be at the forefront of changing trends for all types of industries, most notably within gaming," said Alan Schwartz, general manager of embedded speech solutions at ScanSoft. "ScanSoft speech technologies are powering the next generation of interactive games. We're excited to share our expertise and showcase our solutions at the Game Developers Conference."
Throughout the conference, ScanSoft (Booth #1147) will also showcase demonstrations from popular gaming titles that feature its speech recognition software, including:
- Konami's "LifeLine" (U.S. version of the Japanese title "Operator's Side")
- Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc.'s (Sony) "SOCOM I & II: U.S. Navy SEALs"
- Sony's "Operator's Side"
- Sony's "DEKA Voice"
- Vivarium's "Seaman"
- Ubisoft's "Ghost Recon: JungleStorm"
- Vivendi Universal Games' "SWAT: GLOBAL STRIKE TEAM.
Enhanced Gaming Capabilities Using Speech Recognition
ScanSoft's Games SDK increases player interactivity and improves the overall gaming experience for adventure games, role playing games and strategy games. CNN recently acknowledged the popularity of LifeLine's interactive speech experience stating "Novice gamers would rather speak than punch buttons… an interactive experience like the one 'LifeLine' offers is a novelty that remains fresh for experienced gamers as well".
The Games SDK is ideal for basic command and control functions as well as enabling the end-user to perform complex operations simply by speaking. ScanSoft's ASR 1600 features the following advanced capabilities:
- Speaker Independent Acoustic Models
No training or enrollment of the system is required. The end user can simply plug in the microphone and start playing. However, if designed by the game developer, end-users can also be allowed to teach the system new commands for personal customization.
- Accurate Recognition
The ScanSoft Games SDK features a phoneme-based speech recognition engine that uses proprietary signal processing techniques and advanced speech recognition algorithms to provide highly accurate recognition in different environments.
- Scalable Vocabulary
New words can be simply added by entering text then recompiling the updated BNF grammar offline. The ScanSoft Games SDK supports basic command and control functionality, and also allows the end-user to perform complex operations by voice (i.e. "Team laze on main door" or "Go to the table and look at the green bottle").
- Children Voice Support
Special front-end processing in the engine (Vocal Tract Length Normalization VTLN) is available in all languages. Japanese and American English acoustic models have also been trained with child voices as well as the standard male and female adult voices.
- Multiple language support
The ScanSoft Games SDK is available in American English, Japanese, UK English, French, German, Castilian Spanish, Italian and Korean. In addition to that ScanSoft owns speech data collections for a variety of additional languages that can be made available in the Games SDK upon request.
About ScanSoft Embedded Speech Solutions (ESS)
ScanSoft's Embedded Speech Solutions (ESS) is a leading provider of speech technologies and applications used within automobiles, handsets, consumer devices, talking dictionaries and electronic games. ESS solutions provide an easy-to-use interface for communicating with devices that relieves common frustrations and hazards, or creates a compelling new form of interaction. ESS supplies its leading speech technologies and applications to companies worldwide including Citroen, Clarion, Delphi, Ford, General Motors, Motorola, Nokia, Pioneer, Sony and Visteon. For more information, visit www.scansoft.com/embedded/.
About ScanSoft, Inc.
ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT) is a leading supplier of speech and imaging solutions that are used to automate a wide range of manual processes - saving time, increasing worker productivity and improving customer service. For more information regarding ScanSoft products and technologies, please visit www.ScanSoft.com.
Trademark reference: ScanSoft, the ScanSoft logo and SpeechWorks are registered trademarks or trademarks of ScanSoft, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other company or product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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