And why do you think a game would implement a full voice-recognition needed for dictating texts and an analyzer for sentence-structure? Most voice-recognition only recognizes some words and that would be mostly enough for a game if used clever. nobody want's to port Dragon Naturally Speaking to console.

But to even cherry pick words whilst doing anything else would still be very demanding. It'd have to be done in a "safe" (read no AI) area e.g. hitman safehouse or the likes. It couldn't be done if anything else was going on. 

This many posts already, and not a single person suggesting having Mario himself as the voice?

For SHAME. All of you.

Bloody hell, reminds me of that human-face fish game on the dreamcast... LOL

If you honestly think that requires a lot of processing, I really don't know what else to tell you. I used to voice control an old (slow) P3 computer running Windows 2000, also, one of the Rainbow Six games on the original Xbox allowed in-game voice control of the squads and that processor was certainly very weak by today's standards. The first voice control system for a GUI came out in the late 80's, so obviously it can be done with VERY limited processing resources. I don't know where you get these ideas, simple voice recognition and control has been around a long time, worked on much, much weaker hardware than what we have today, and does NOT require much processing power. Cherry picking the keywords out of converted text is also not processor intensive at all, neither is a simple text based query to find the propor response or action. We're not talking about something like Siri here.

The in-game voice controls however were specific sentences. There was no variation whatsoever in them. Go figure how many different ways there are of asking to upgrade your suit.

I get these ideas from remembering what those games were like, and what people are now asking for...Don't be patronising please, there's no need. 

Also you say "We're not talking about something like Siri here". See the potential issue? Everyone with a 4s onwards will expect a similar experience otherwise "Why is my small phone kicking my brand new consoles ass??". Reviews will inevitably compare the two systems and therefore you have to be able to offer a similar experience at the very least. 

I have to believe if Nintendo is at all intelligent with the Star Fox franchise, the next one will have your squad and communications appear on the Gamepad.

You must have missed what I said about picking out keywords from the sentence. This greatly simplifies the overall process and would allow something like what I'm describing to work. For the example we're using, no matter how you ask to upgrade your suit, the words 'upgrade' and 'suit' should always be in that sentence (hell, even if only the word 'suit' was in the sentence, it could say 'What would you like to do with your suit' and give you options), so the system knows which menu to take you into based on those keywords alone. From there it would be as simple as the computer asking you which upgrade you would like to apply, and either inputting the answer via touchscreen or voice. Because this is in-game and therefore very specific to that game, and because you're interacting with a virtual assistant that only performs specific functions within the game, the number of commands does not have to be even close to what Siri is able to process. It's been a while since I've done any programming, but when I was in college (back in '02) one of my classmates made a proof of concept in VB similar to this and was able to process queries, then present a response from natural sentence structure by picking out pre-programmed keywords without having to parse the entire sentence using either keyboard or off-the-shelf voice recognition software as the input, and without using significant processing power... so I know it could be done. It probably won't, but it is possible.

Though something like this could (unfairly) get compared to Siri, there could still be some cool applications.

EDIT: Though if this were implemented via the cloud like Siri, this discussion would become a moot point.

But you still have to record the entire sentence to determine where the key words are. You can't just "go deaf" when it's not a word that is recognised. I don't understand how you couldn't parse the entire sentence as the entire sentence still needs to be analysed to find the key words. 

The only issue with the cloud is latency, although if Nintendo managed the cloud, that would seem more realistic then a dev or publisher. 

If you convert the spoken sentence to text, the system does not have to understand the entire sentence. It can analyze the words as text and process only the ones in a keywords database, resulting in a more simple command to execute, such as turning the phrase "Let's go ahead and upgrade my suit" into "upgrade suit". It is much simpler to extract keywords than to process and understand an entire sentence using natural speech and grammar, thus requiring significantly less complex code, making for significantly less processing power required.