Speech recognition burst into games with the release of the highly innovative Seaman in 1999. Recent high profile, successful deployments such as the online PlayStation® 2 title "SOCOM: US Navy Seals" and the "Operator's Side" have proven the concept of integration of speech as a very important differentiator in a highly competitive market.

The VoCon Games Speech SDKs provide all the power of our extensive speech experience to all types of games developers. Who else but Nuance could make speech recognition seem like child's play? Integrating VoCon Games into console game titles maximizes the gaming experience for the end user. Speech recognition is ideal not only for basic command and control, but also allows the end user to perform complex operations simply by speaking thus adding significant value to any game. Another reason to integrate speech recognition has been the introduction of online games. If no teammates are around a player can simulate real-time, in-game communication by issuing voice commands to control a team of artificial characters.

Games can easily be voice-enabled using the powerful development toolkit built on VoCon Games Speech SDK from Nuance. Game characters can be enhanced by giving them the power of conversation, transforming them into personalized, intelligent creatures. Animated characters come to life by enabling genuine dialog and accurate response to players' voice commands. Speech recognition is well suited to numerous applications including adventure games, role playing games, strategy games, first person shooter games, sports games, etc. No matter what genre of game you want to speech enable, with the VoCon Games Speech SDK developers can easily create the required vocabularies and speech dialogs on their own. Speech-enabled games increase player interactivity and improve the overall gaming experience.

The VoCon Games Speech SDK delivers a flexible and easy-to-use SDK that enables game developers to easily add speech recognition functionality into game titles. VoCon Games includes modules that allow adding any word or phrase into the active vocabulary, which can support hundreds of commands in parallel. A structured grammar formalism enables game developers to activate and deactivate sub-vocabularies as needed to guarantee a maximum level of recognition performance. The VoCon Games Speech SDK includes a suite of additional development tools, an evaluator for PC, sample program code and detailed documentation and is available for Sony PlayStation 2 as well as for Nintendo GameCube.

• Easily voice-enable PlayStation 2 or GameCube games using a powerful, yet easy-to-use development toolkit built on top of the VoCon Games speech recognition engine.
  
  
• Enhance game characters by giving them the power of conversation and transforming them into personalized, intelligent creatures.
  
  
• Make animated characters come to life by enabling genuine dialog and accurate responses to players' voice command.
  
  
• Simulate real-time, in-game communication by issuing voice commands to control individual AI teammates or an entire team.