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?

Text to speech is interesting - didn't think about that one at all. You could prompt for a weather summary, then walk away from the TV as the Wii delivers the results to you by audio. Would be cool :)

the fur shading is nothing new. The original GC had it... If the Wii just got support for it... the Wii... well... wtf? Why didnt it have it? Text to speech is killer... but it's nothing special. Text to speech was around in 93. And if you look up some of the 64k demos, some of them have speech as well. Nothing sounds amazing there, besides the mention of Text to Speech. but Like I said, it's nothing new... and what does that matter? you can fit around 50hours of audio in 1gb. 25hours of audio in 500mb. and more like what would be in a game. 5hours of audio in about 100megs. I promise you, Text to Speech will never sound as good as a real voice actor.

If I was as optimistic as you Kwaad, I would just jump straight off the nearest cliff I could find. Does it *REALLY* hurt that much to say something POSITIVE, about news that is POSITIVE??

Something like... "we have a new text to speech application that sounds like this." "I'm so sexy sounding ohhh yeah." and then I would say. Holy crap amazing. These are all things that have been done in the past, are being done today on every home console. This might be amazing if it was for the DS or PSP... but wait!!! My PSP has fur shading. So even that for a handheld wouldnt be very impressive. My point is, when your trying to impress someone with technology news... it's better to find something 'new'. Playing news that happend 5 years ago, and saying it's new... is pointless. What do you want me to say? Wow, amazing a 7th generation console FINALLY gets stuff that was in 5th generation consoles! Fur shading! Wow, amazing! a 7th generation console has stuff that a computer could do 15 years ago. Text to voice! How can you be positive about that?

This is really fantastic news. I get the impression Nintendo is traditionally very secretive with 3rd parties, so it's great to see them providing them with more than just bare-bones tools and specs.

...BTW I read somewhere that the text-to-speech was almost shipped with the News Channel, but it just didn't have the right feel or something... also text-to-speech with Japanese is *very* hard, and essentially impossible with proper names. They were going to have one of your Miis read the news to you

That would be... errr... well... cute!

Its NOT a technology article - its a TOOLS article. They aren't saying "Wow - we have managed to work out text --> speech" - that would be a laugh. The news is that the tools *every* Wii developer will have access to, will have this functionality/libraries built-in. And that is very much a positive.

oh... no-wonder 3rd party GC games sucked...