Voice controls are the newest awesome thing in this console generation. Every console except the Wii U allows you to yell at it like a disappointed father in order to get it to do stuff. Even Windows 10 allows you to bark commands at Cortana in order to get her to launch programs and manage files.
But… nobody does. Nobody ever tells their Xbox or Playstation what to do using voice commands because it’s dumb. We already have a very efficient interface for controlling these consoles. It’s called a controller. The amount of time it takes to say a command, then have the console process and execute it is simply longer than the amount of time it takes to use a d-pad, scroll to the option you want, and press a button.
This is the primary problem with voice controls as we have implemented them so far. We have simply looked at what consoles already can do and decided to allow them to do the same thing by shouting at them. All the while we are just sitting there and doing nothing with our arms and hands, the things we normally use to play games. Nothing is easier it’s just different and awkward.
But what if we changed the way we thought about controls like this? What if, instead of acting like a substitute, voice controls acted like a supplement . Instead of having them replace our hands, what if we used our voice as a third arm?
Let me explain. As it stands, no one uses voice controls because you could just as easily use the controller to launch a game or watch a movie. But if your hands are occupied, it suddenly becomes a lot harder to do anything with them. So let’s look at a circumstnace in which our hands are occupied, like, say, while playing a video game.
You are fighting an incredibly difficult boss. You have died several times, and you have absolutely no idea how to win. Right now, you’re probably thinking it’s time to look at a walkthrough. As it stands, you would have to put down the game, look up a walkthrough, remember what it tells you, then come back to the game.
But with well implemented voice commands, you don’t have to put down the game at all. Instead, in the middle of the boss fight you could just shout “tell me how to beat this thing!” and the console could look up a walkthrough or a gameplay video for you. It could even read the walkthrough to you, telling you exactly what to do in order to get past this point in the game.
A lot of our console capabilities are good candidates for voice commands, but they aren’t implemented well. We live in a gaming community entirely saturated with social media where everything we do is chronicled. Both consoles have made it a point to include options that allow you to record Youtube videos and start streaming at the push of a button. But what if you didn’t have to push a button? What if you could simply say “start streaming” whenever you got to a new part in the game, and suddenly you were an internet star? What if you never had to stop playing to make online content? That’s what we should be striving for. Simply say something and not only will you start recording and streaming, but you’ll post notifications to Twitter, Facebook, and all other sorts of social media.
That’s the key. Voice controls exist to make our lives easier. They allow us to multitask and spend less time away from our games. So they should be implemented in areas in which you are actually saving time by multitasking. As it stands, our current implementation of voice controls is rather uninspired. Nobody thought of how this was an actual innovation. Nobody thought of what purpose it might serve. The only thing people thought of was “hey, wouldn’t voice controls be neat?”
But on the upside, shallow voice controls now likely mean well-implemented voice controls in a generation or two.