Nintendo World Report - Takeshi Shimada's GDC 2007 Presentation This looks like it was an interesting session with Takeshi Shimada from Nintendo discussing the handwriting and speech recognition tools used in Brain Training. He's directs 3 teams working on development tools and software libraries for Nintendo and third parties. At the end Shimida discussed some new development tools they're working on for Wii: He also briefly touched on some Wii development tools in the works that will be made available to both first and third parties. He highlighted a development tool called NintendoWare, developed by Nintendo and HAL, that emulates Wii hardware on the PC so that artists can view an accurate representation of their special effects without loading their code onto a Wii development kit. He also noted that his group is working on easy-to-incorporate fur-shading middleware and predictive input (so the game can guess what you're about to do based on prior motion). NCL is also looking into the utility of text-to-speech for Wii. Text to speech sounds interesting, I wonder if it could be used in the Wii interface and channels, so the news, weather, etc, are spoken to you?