In the lead up to the launch of Wii there are bound to be hundreds of rumours flying about and all should be taken with a pinch of salt until official confirmation from Nintendo. We've been avoiding most of the rumours, as they've been getting quite out of hand, but when we spotted the following information, found on IGN and from a source that has been correct in the past, we thought it was worth letting you guys know.

Wii will apparently feature a voice to text communication that can be used on first party games. This is apparently how it will work:

“The system works using an advanced voice recognition system which Nintendo has been developing for several years. When a user speaks the sound is converted into on screen text and sent to the other players. However, rather than just plain text being sent the system also picks up the tone, pitch and volume of the voice and translates that into colour, font size and character set. For example, if a player shouts ‘I win’ loudly into the microphone the on screen text may be all capitalized, and in a large red font; conversely if a player speaks quietly the font may be a pastel shade and smaller.”

Whilst this may sound slightly ridiculous and could be steeped in problems such as regional accent recognition, a patent has already been filed by Nintendo back in February 2004.

Once again we'll have to wait to see whether the patent will be put to use with Wii.

Source : IGN forums

Patent: US.gov