No mainland European Kinect voice recognition till spring 2011

Obviously the biggest news story here is that it features no support for the Welsh language this thing will tank without it

I am disappoint!

What about French? German? Italian? Greek?

Not being able to read native language in several EU countries will disappoint many potential consumers who wanted to use the vocal commands who only speak native tongue.

Me? I will just shout “Oi,play me a game”.

Wait, so this means that the voice controls for Kinect wont be usable by nearly all of Europe?

@1 – “Xbox ble mae bloody gamio, innit?” If they made it understand Welsh I think I could actually die content.

@2 – It would seem that way, yep.

@2 All Europe know English very well.

I don’t see a problem here at all. Basics are here.

No, all of Europe dont know English enought to use Kinect. What a stupid thing to say.

@5 You of course know how much people will buy that thing who don’t know or know english.
In my European country (that is not english centric) knows that language very well. 90% of the people.

English is the international language, so go figure.

@4 That is the most ridiculous comment I’ve seen on this site for a while. It’s quite clear that SOME of Europe speak English fluently, but suggesting that those unfortunate enough to be living in the very poorest areas of say, Romania, have strong enough lanuguage skills to use any of the various English settings for Kinect is wholly comical.

Not to mention children.

Anyway, it’s not like you need to talk to it to be able to use it in most cases.

I’m British and I live in France. I do live in a rural area, but there’s no way on God’s earth people round here know enough English to use something like Kinect. People speak French in France. It’s the same in Germany. Most young people can speak a reasonable level of English, but they speak German. Asking them to use a piece of hardware like this in another language can only be a temporary measure; they will have to add French, German and European Spanish support.

@8 Exactly, all in all, I probably wont be bothering with Voice Control after trying in once. I’d say gesture control is easily the biggest draw of Kinect.

The clever stuff Kinect is doing is the body tracking. That is proper tricky and impressive new tech. I would have thought voice control was fairly well established tech though. Presumably it just has a subset of commands it needs to understand too? Or does it do something more extensive?

@1 The Welsh!? Haha! Brilliant!

woo, australia was mentioned but no news on whether or not it’ll support voice recognition here, i don’t see why not, our de facto language is (British) English.

I have a funny feeling its not just the welsh, but the scots, us irish and people from liverpool who won’t be able to use kinect’s voice feature, aww shame!

@6 Everyone in Austria knows English? (reference to my previous replies to you)

Wow, so even if you do know English perfectly (or even Mexican Spanish dosnt scare you if you happen to know standard Spanish), if you arent living in the country, no voice recognition for you. The amount of fail here is just epic, more rushing stuff from MS.

The voice recognition of Kinect is very good even if you put on an accent. I tried doing so

@16
I guess it’s an experience thing. If they don’t think people will get a good enough experience from it then it’s better to disable than give a bad experience. From what LePlatypus says you’d expect it to be ok with English and a French/German/Spanish/etc. accent though. So maybe a little overzealous.

This isn’t really a surprise, and will no doubt be played down by MS.

In the end they had the choice of delaying release until they had it fully ready for all regions in terms of language support or rely on the old staple of US centric companies with something new, focus on English first and play catch up.

With Move releasing and having no such issues due to it’s (currently) different approach it’s not really a surprise MS didn’t want to allow Move a holiday period and a fair few months all to itself before launching.

They want Kinect on shelves next to Move in December, not a spring 2011 launch.

Saying that though, it still of course sucks somewhat for non-English speakers – although it should be noted this is a fairly minor element of Kinect capability and hardly one that should be a deal breaker.

@ Patrick Garratt
Since when do you live in France?
I thought you were managing this site from the UK.

Kinects aren’t region locked the software is just make a US/UK/whatever account and it’ll work fine

And the Euros get shafted again I don’t know who has screwed you guys over more SONY or M$

Gotta wonder what this means for Ireland, as English is our main language anyway. Wanna find out for me Pat? =P

what do you mean by Sony & MS screwing over Europe? we Aussies pay up to & over $100 US dollars (up to $120 Aussie dollars) for a standard game, when you brits & americans pay only $60 US Dollars, then again, New Zealenders get screwed even further…

@24 why are the prices so high, that’s ridiculous!

@24 how much average person earns a week month year? Maybe thats why?

It might understand English, but it might struggle with accents. Even in england regional accents can be quite tricky to understand.