2) No one has been complaining spotty voice recognition from the languages Microsoft support at the moment. We'll see if that changes when they launch the next batch of supported languages.

3) Less easy or effective? It looks way faster than going through a bunch of menus for giving your squad commands, not to mention hellishly more immersive. The storytelling aspect might not be easier or faster, but it has potential to be much more immersive I think. And it's not like you need good response time for that...

I found the section that touched on this in the interview between Geoff Keighley and Don Mattrick on GTTV revealing. Watch the video here (the relevant section is between 2.45 and 3.02, but there is other good stuff in there). In short, Don makes it pretty clear that a mic could do the job just as well (which, obviously, it could).

So, Microsoft, in their drive to promote Kinect, are presumably limiting the function to Kinect only (I kinda still hope this isn't the case). Which, if true, is a shame as it would be awesome if a broader base of 360 players could also use the function, but understandable as Microsoft want to sell more Kinects. In short, it seems Microsoft are stinging their own Kinect-free customers here, who already all have mics, and I think that's a bit shitty. It's just voice control, after all. It's not that big or that clever. If SingStar can do it, I can't see any reason why any game shouldn't be able to employ it.

That aside, the function itself appears to be one of the least useful I could imagine for ME (which is one of my favourite games, by the way). For example: pressing a button is quicker and easier than saying something like, 'Make the sexxors with me.' Talking is slower and unintuitive (especially when those onscreen don't repeat what you've just uttered). I'm pretty sure I'll never use it (just like I don't use voice control in SingStar, even though it works really well).

Voice commands for combat are potentially more useful, but completely lack fine control, and could potentially be useless in practice (how could I command Miranda to Warp the 2nd heavy weapon guy on the right on the gantry at the other side of the battlefield? It's too complex a target). There are simply better games to integrate this sort of tech. Here it feels tagged on and gimmicky, only employed to allow Microsoft to add the BEST WITH KINECT banner.

My Kinect is highly unlikely to be used for this. Give me decent integration of Kinect's capabilities, please, not gimmicks.

That's Bioware's problem, because they don't need to use Kinect libaries to make voice commands work with everything else. I'm not taking shots at MS or Kinect if you haven't noticed yet.  The feature itself is of course cool for console players since console players don't have keyboards to macro things or keybind all sorts of commands to. I wouldn't use it even if they had it on PC since pressing a key or button is faster than voice commands.

I'm going to call you out on these. I think your enthusiam for the tech is perhaps blinding you to some obvious flaws.

2) The Kinect often fails to get one of my voice commands correct. It is not 100% accurate at all. Certainly nowhere near as accurate as pressing A.

3) It will be very much slower. Let me explain why it is in two important ways:

Assume the order I want to give is for Tali to arm a Shotgun. This is as simple an order as I can imagine. Choices for this are:

i) Say 'Tali: Shotgun'.

ii) Press LB and select the Shotgun.

The first option, i), not only takes longer in practice, as it takes more time to utter the words clearly than it does to select the shotgun (which takes a fraction of a second once practiced), but it also takes far, far longer in-game. During play, option i) takes a second or two, during which time you wil be shot, or the state of the battlefield may even have changed; option ii), by comparison, is instantaneous, as the game pauses while the order is sent.

In short, voice commands are always slower. More immersive, probably, but much slower, and also considerably less accurate. And I don't just mean in terms of recognising quickly uttered phrases (which it will not always do as I mentioned in 2 above, especially as voices will frequently be excited), but I mean for accurately targetting bad guys as I mentioned in my previous post.

That all said, perhaps it will work in a way I simply don't expect. However, having played many games with voice recognition, both good and bad, I kinda doubt it.

uh, and I'm saying that it's not as hard as you are thinking, it's not like there are not open source libaries out there that they can look at, the coding gap is much closer these days, and remember that the game has been delayed by many months too, they could easily put some more Kinect features in and add voice support for all versions and add patches later, it's 2011.

2) Voice commands aren't supported where I live, so I go by what seems to be happening on the forums, and I haven't seen a single person complain. If that's not the way it is, then fair enough, I haven't exactly done any deep investigation here.

3) I guess it depends on play style. I've never been using my squad in detail enough to change a characters weapon, in combat more than maybe five times throughout any of the games. I've never gotten to the point where I know the placements of the different abilities in the menus by heart either, so for me, voice commands seem like more fun in that they add immersion (hopefully), while giving me a less cluttered experience.

If you're playing on a higher difficulty then I agree it's probably not good enough, but for me, that's not going to be an issue.

uh, and I'm saying that it's not as hard as you are thinking, it's not like there are not open source libaries out there that they can look at, the coding gap is much closer these days, and remember that the game has been delayed by many months too, they could easily put some more Kinect features in and add voice support for all versions and add patches later, it's 2011.

2) Really? That also sucks. In short: it doesn't always work very well. Sometimes I have to command the device a couple of times or more to get it to do what I want, especially if there are people talking at the same time. It usually works, but not reliably. It's unreliable enough that I pretty much never use the function in practice. As I mentioned before, buttons are quicker and more accurate. After the 'oooooh, new toy' phase passes, it's just a slower, less-accurate way of accessing your console's functions (which is also true for navigating using Kinect's motion sensing; in fact, this is significantly slower, and significantly less accurate).

3) I, by comparison, always use my squad, and always use my powers, so soon they were second nature to me. So, perhaps you're correct, for casual gamers it will be more useful. Run and gunners and the like. I've also completed both games on Insanity with both Paragon and Renegade playthroughs, so I'm very used to the LB/RB dials (or L1/L2 dials, or space bar on PC -- I've played them all).

However, as I said in my previous post, I'm not really bothered by the integration for all I think it won't work well, I'm bothered by how it's been limited to Kinect only, which is a slap in the face to many loyal ME fans, all of whom have mics on 360, mics that could do the job just as well.