Kinect Voice Control Only Launching in Four Countries [Update]

Microsoft has confirmed earlier rumours that at launch Kinect will only support voice recognition in four countries: the UK, Japan, the US and Mexico. This means that folks in the majority of Europe won’t be able to enjoy the voice recognition features (arguably some of the cooler stuff) that comes with Microsoft’s £130 motion device until Spring 2011.

Update: raghraghragh points out in the comments a story on Shacknews where Microsoft has said that it was a “misunderstanding” that English speaking Canadians will have to wait until next year for voice control and will be getting it in November. French speaking Canadians are the ones who will have to wait. My hilarious “about” joke below still stands though. However, if you live in Canada or somewhere that speaks the above languages, you still won’t be able to use the voice recognition features because each Kinect device is region locked in the same way your console is.

Microsoft will be adding this support in next year, but it basically means that if you’re from Germany and can speak perfect English, there’s still no voice control for you. This is likely because Microsoft hasn’t finished the software for such control in each language yet. Rather than having a feature that is totally useless to the majority of Europeans and people elsewhere in the world on the device, they’ve just turned it off.

More interesting to me is how it will deal with accents, especially thick ones, with a Microsoft spokesperson telling me that “voice recognition of various languages includes supporting many dialects and accents” and that Microsoft “is dedicated to supporting a large range of voice variations”.

This will be interesting to test, especially in places such as Scotland where, despite the fact that I spending a lot of time there, I still find it hard to understand some of the accents. This is categorically proven by this Burnistoun sketch of two Scots trying to tell a voice acivated lift which floor they want to go to. (Made, funnily enough, by XBL’s The Independint Charles Show host Robert Florence).

Accents are likely the reason for the delay in other countries too, with Mexican Spanish being different than the Spanish they speak in Spain. As for Canada, they might just be struggling with the Canadian pronunciation of “about”.