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Why do I need a camera to issue voice commands?
Just been reading that the PS4 camera might be able to allow users to control their system through voice commands, just like the Xbox 1 and 360. This got me wondering why do I need a camera to do this? Why cant I issue voice commands to my system via my headset?
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I know this could be done by the CPU, but maybe MS have offloaded this to the Kinect.
I'm just guessing here mind.
That doesnt help the single player though
Doesn't hinder it, either.
This
It seems obvious enough that it would be for group/family games that require you to make noise
You can imagine a family of 4 gathering the mic on a headset to shout stuff during a game
I can imagine a family using something like Kinect to do their voice commands while someone playing solo uses either the Kinect or Headset, whichever best suits them.
Maybe the better question would have been
Why limit voice commands to the camera?
I'm sure I read somewhere there is a delay on such actions, maybe a few seconds, to cancel such a thing happening. Think this was someone in MS saying they have thought about your mates messing up your game when they walk in a room and shout out a command to the console while your playing.
The camera adds to the voice input mechanism by tracking whether you are looking at the screen, and of course it knows when you are playing a game, so that should help too. It also knows which player is you, and that friends shouting out from the background aren't players. If you watch the Kinect technology demo videos, there is quite a lot about this stuff.
So the camera was designed to be an integral part of the voice input system. I daresay they could achieve similar results with a head-set mic, knowing which player has which head-set. It's possible they didn't design it that way because they didn't know they had to, because they didn't anticipate the negative public reaction to Kinect. Allowing Kinect to be unplugged was one of their slowest policy U-turns, even though it would seem to be one of the simplest (given that they already allowed it to be turned off in software, so the system never depended on it being there).