Prologix Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
THIS MONTH’S FOCUS: ‘Speech Technology in Video Games’					Newsletter January, 2005
	Welcome to the January Issue of the Prologix Newsletter Speech technology continues to be at the forefront of changing trends for all types of industries. It is well adopted in telephony applications like banking, directory assistance and almost in every IVR Application. In the embedded world, automotive is the key driver for speech. It helps to increase driver's safety and convenience: it allows them to enter a destination for navigation, select music from his or her MP3 player etc. On top of that there are other markets like the disabled applications market, the language learning market, Value added services in mobile handsets etc. which are relevant for embedded speech.
	In an emerging trend, Speech is increasingly proving to add real value to games. It is slowly becoming a differentiator that enables new game play. As a number of speech enabled games successfully hit the market, the interest in speech is now increasing in the fields of video games and entertainment. This is true for both text-to-speech synthesis as well as speech recognition technology. Since speech is a natural way of communicating, enabling video games with speech is a natural process in the attempt to bring a higher interactive experience to games. Furthermore, the rapidly growing processing power available to modern day game consoles makes speech an easily attainable objective. Game developers are already working with speech recognition technology in order to incorporate a speech command channel in their games. In the same way, text to speech technology may be used to create special voices for game characters. As a result, a speech session and a game session can be viewed as two complementary contexts that work together to create a richer and a more entertaining gaming experience. By adding speech recognition to a game, real communication between player and characters becomes possible. This is obviously a milestone in the integration of artificial intelligence into the game characters. Text-to-speech will help give the characters a voice, where communication can go way beyond the current generation where output is restricted to a set of pre-recorded prompts. The first results seem to show that this new form of man-machine interface is especially well suited for social gaming. As part of this series, we have always attempted to introduce our readers to the technology that we must watch out for – that has direct relevance to the work we do and the potential to impact it strongly in the near future. In this issue, we focus on Speech enabled video games and also attempt to discuss how speech technology can play a significant role in the entertainment world. Happy New Year to you, and Happy Reading! ~Editor In this month issue: you never have to take your hands off the controls or remember complicated key combinations…more Telephone conversation with Santa Claus…more		Prologix Speech components for Gaming VoiceXML Interpreter Speech adds a whole new element to the user experience for games. The Prologix VoiceXML interpreter – is a flexible enabler that can rapidly help game developers enable Speech Technology in their game interfaces. Downloads Learn more about VoiceXML Interpreter…click here Prologix White Paper on VXML Interpreter…click here VoiceXML Interpreter - for Video Games…click here Text to Speech Engine Prologix has developed the first ever finest quality Indian language text to speech Software – Vaachak, Vaachak can help clearly read out Indian language and English text, providing a higher level of flexibility to the game interface developer. Using Vaachak – game characters can be freed from the limitations of recorded prompts and made infinitely more lifelike… Click here to download more information on Vaachak. “Prologix's Game components can add tremendous creativity to a variety of Game applications. Both our components are industry standards compliant and extremely easy to integrate into gaming consoles/ applications. The flexibility provided by real time speech interactions has the potential to take gaming to the next level of realism for serious gamers“ - said Vinamra Agarwal, Vice President, Business Development
	You never have to take your hands off the controls or remember complicated key combinations United States of America US based Ubisoft Entertainment have developed an interactive voice control for IL-2: Pacific Fighters. IL-2 series comes a re-creation of the epic battles of the Pacific. By this
	interactive speech enabled application it is not possible for you to control over 40 fighters and bombers including the deadly Japanese Zero, the U.K.’s Supermarine Seafire and the U.S.-made Corsair and A-20 Havoc using intuitive voice commands, meaning you never have to take your hands off the controls or remember complicated key combinations. Voice Buddy SmartKeys (VBSK) technology instantly learns your entire customized pilot profile. For starters, the Voice Buddy IL-2 Edition assigns all the IL-2 commands to keys. No more unassigned or user defined keys. The minute you install it, Voice Buddy gives you a new pilot with all commands activated, ready-to-fly. VBSK technology goes one step beyond that. It enables Voice Buddy to instantly learn your other entire pilot profiles and give you voice control over their key commands. No matter what keys you assigned, even those linked to flight controller buttons, they all will work with voice control without wasting time on reprogramming key assignments. New Voice Buddy software instantly lets you take total control of your favorite game using simple, intuitive voice commands. No more fumbling for key combinations in the middle of a dogfight or pausing to consult a manual. With Voice Buddy, you call out the commands and the game instantly responds.
	Telephone conversation with Santa Claus MONTREAL, Canada Canada based three web and voice technologies companies have recently launched the Talk to Santa Claus application. The application uses Web and voice technologies such as speech recognition, text-to-speech, and the VoiceXML standard to enable an interactive and personalized telephone chat with Santa Claus. This application enables users to invite children and young-at-heart adults to experience an interactive and personalized telephone conversation with Santa Claus and Pixel, the automated elf. In order to personalize the conversation, a parent or other adult used the Web site to submit information about the recipient. At the Santa Web site http://www.talktosantaclaus.com/, they were asked to provide some basic information about the child, such as age and gender, whether the child had already written to Santa, and an idea of what gift the child would like to receive from Santa. They could also include advice that Santa would give - many parents took this opportunity to offer instructions about doing homework and not fighting with siblings! Parents and legal guardians also had the option to allow the portion of the call where the child told Santa what gift he or she would like to be recorded. This recording would then be sent to the parent by email after the conversation. After registration, the child received an email from the North Pole telling them that Santa would like to talk to them. Using the toll-free number and the "secret" code (which, of course, was an electronic ID that enabled the application to find the correct information for each child) contained in the email, the child was able to reach Santa's workshop. Each call was answered by Pixel, the elf; Santa joined the conversation a little later on. The Santa project running on Voice Select, the Bell Canada interactive voice response platform that supports the VoiceXML standards and uses voice technologies like text-to-speech (TTS) and speech recognition.
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