Fonix announced the release of the Fonix VoiceIn 5.0 tool-kit for the iPhone 3G. Fonix specializes in embedded speech interfaces for mobile devices and video game systems such as the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii platforms.
“We expect to leverage our prior successes with video game developers that incorporate Fonix VoiceIn® Game tool-kit for an increasingly growing mobile video game market,” says Steven G. Jones, Fonix Director of sales and business development. “A hands free game like Tom Clancy’s EndWar developed by Ubisoft features Fonix VoiceIn® for Games and is a natural fit for the Apple iPhone 3G.
Developers such as Ubisoft, Vivendi, EA Sports, and Harmonix are amongst the prior (non iPhone) licensees for this toolkit.
This could introduce voice command enabled games in the future for the iPhone. Although they specifically pinpoint the iPhone “3G", it seems unlikely that it would be incompatible with the original iPhone due to the similarities in hardware between the two models. Unfortunately, the iPod Touch has no microphone so would be unable to take advantage of this feature.
The App Store already has some applications which provide speech recognition services, such as SpeechCloud’s Voice Dialer, but these applications appear to off-load the speech processing to a central server rather than processing it on the iPhone itself. In contrast, Fonix’s recognizer actually executes on the iPhone itself.
[ via 9to5mac ]
