Yeah, it does suck. I'm guessing Microsoft don't want it out until it's good enough, so hopefully it is this fall. The voice commands in WP7 works fine with my accent, so it can't be that far off.

@ Munkeh111

As was concluded, it's doable with other hardware, but Microsoft have made it really easy to utilize with Kinect and BioWare don't want to spend ressources building it up for the other platforms.

come on people the piece of crap mic you get with the XBL gold starter kit is not even able to capture sound correctly to do voice chat.... there is no way even with good software that the tech would have worked correctly for everyone with a headset......

then again why spen more TIME on top of MONEY to dev something that is already there with kinect... it's a no brainer.... I'm working on a project... client A comes to me says: "hey dude! how about doing that with our new device??? we'll do most of the work for you!" me: "word! you got a deal my friend!" hell for all we know they might even have paid them more to do it... so yes it's kinect exclusive

now about accent... think it's more an issue of set up.... I'm not a native english speaker.... my GF either and most of my friends are foreigners from different countries.... or americans but with foreign background..... almost none of them have issues to have their voice recognise in english... except when obviously they cut half of a word cause of the accent or the innability to pronounce a sylable....


now you are talking about speed and other people are talking about immersion...... those are too different things.... there is nothing immersive into finishing a game in insanity mode in half the time your best buddy does.... this is hardcore gaming not immersive experience of a game...... especially for RPG.... combat phases will be way more immersive if you issue commands vocaly than with the wheel... there is absolutely no doubt about it.... I don't see how you can't see that....????????? when I play an RPG I don't give a damn about going fast through it.... you play on a clock ??? and if you're talking about skills then there you go try to play insanity mode in voice command only without dying.... if it's slower than the wheel it is still more realistic and will give you way more credit as the tactician than on your skills to mash on buttons faster than an epileptic having a seisure..... so yeah i even can see how it is interesting for hardcore gamers.....

I just hope they'll put a 100 achievement points just for finishing the game in insanity without poping the wheel once...... and we'll see who is hardcore then :P

many will not agree with me... but to me this features are just bait from MS (helped by Bioware) to hook some new users to kinect... my phone writes my sms by voice in english (and that isnt my birth language (many can spot that very easily by my posts and grammar)) with no calibration and with a 1mb aplication and a not much bigger library... so such thing is achievable with not that much effort, even more, most commands dont need to be spoken with 100% accuracy...

Anyone that has used Kinect before, will tell you that it adapts to your voice and others over time. After a while it picks up your speech patterns and accent. I have been using voice control for menus, netflix, espn, and it works fantastic. It has a multi-array mic to capture sound, where as a headset uses a single basic microphone, which is very hard to correlate to great output.

I feel that this addition to ME3 was a no brainer as the menus in ME become extremely irritating when you have to pull it up every two seconds.

Now about what the other side of this argument was talking about, when using a standard controller you still have to aim at the person you want them to attack, also how do you know there won't be different commands like defensive, which would mean anyone shooting at you they will attack, or something like mixed mode, or agressive. Which would change their approach all together. Very complicated things that take time and pull you out of the world made simple by a single phrase. It would IMO make it simpler and alot faster to do various things without needing a menu.

That is quite silly.

First of all, the usage in dialogues is just silly. You say something, and then your on-screen-character will say something similar. It sounds so pointless that nobody will be using it for more than 2 minutes.

It might be somewhat useful in battles though. (I cannot really judge how much, because personally I found Mass Effect so boring I couldn't stand it for even 10 minutes)

The fact that it only works with Kinect speaks for itself. It would work with just about every microphone, using the headset would actually probably be superior. (Because when using a headset the microphone is centimeters away from your mouth, while it is meters away when using Kinect). And there are much more 360 owners with a headset than with a Kinect out there.
So to enjoy ME3 with voice controls, you need a 150$ device, even though the game won't even use Kinect's real features, it would work just as fine (or even better) with just any 1$ microphone.

Reading that Kotaku article it sounds like BioWare actually just included it because it was very little additional work anyway. A proper solution would have been to include some generic voice recognition libraries that work with just any audio input. But BioWare probably realized that in the end, voice recognition is not really THAT useful in Mass Effect, so they simply added some minimalistic Kinect support so the game would get a nice Kinect label.

@sergiodaly if people buy the kinect just for voice control in ME3 they are stupid.... I mean who in the bunch of people who don't already have it would change their mind just for that even if well implemented..... and about the size of the file there is a difference between voice recognition to writte a text and doing the same to give orders and I doubt when you are texting you have massive explosion and laser blast going off around you in 5.1????

and even if the file is 1mb it doesn't mean it doesn't take time and money to compile..... especially to have compatibility with a lot of different hardware..... then again the mic on cellphones are of way better quality on todays phone than most mics on headsets....

@oblivion exactly voice control and even gesture should be added to a lot of RPGs..... especially turned based.... switch weapon, switch spells etc.... I can see that in dragon age, asking to be heald by a specific character, ask them to cast specific spells in specific order, adopt a new tactic.
in turned based make combat more exciting.... you drop the controler and your gesture and voice take over.....

the mic on my playschool tape recorder from when I was 5 y.o. is probably of better quality than the mic in most headset and certainly the XB branded ones.... for once I'll trash MS that stuff is a piece of poo poo..... the kinect mic in another room picks up voice sound better than that mic next to my mouth.... so I don't say what you're are saying is not true about it being doable...... but I can guarantee you not with the XBL standard headset... that's for sure.....

noise cancelation... is easy...
of course no one will buy it just for that... but MS (like any other company) is trying to put every single little thing in the scale to convince people to buy their products... i didnt say MS was doing it wrong... i was saying that i spot their attempt with this one!

also didnt say that this was as easy as in other platforms and that kinect didn´t help... i just point it out that is easy... maybe not as easy but never the less... easy!

yeah but that the thing it's already done at calibration of the kinect for the noise cancelation..... but yeah it's doable easily on every mic.... but once again they did it because it was easy and almost costless for them ( bioware) ..... not because they couldn't do it for the rest.... I think here yeah it's MS trying to sell product no doubt about it.... but it's more bioware not wanting to do extra work.... or maybe like I said they just got paid more to do it on kinect only and might have a close stipulating they won't do it for the rest..... in any case bioware had probably no incentive to do it for everyone.... it's not like it gonna sell less because of it....

I'll tell you right now a regular mic would lead to so many voice control errors just like endwar. This is not a good way to do voice technology, Kinect is perfect because of the way it adapts to everyone specific speech pattern and accent.

Plus like others have said it has a multi-array mic and noise cancellation built-in.