PlayStation 4 Camera

We regularly whisper sweet little somethings into our PlayStation 3’s disc drive, but other than the slight purr of the system’s primary fan, we don’t get much in the way of a response. That could be about to change with the PlayStation 4, as a Linked In job listing has hinted that Sony could be about to follow in Microsoft’s footsteps, and incorporate voice recognition into its impending machine.

The filing – which requests a ‘Speech Recognition Engineering Intern’ – seeks a candidate to assist in “speech noise reduction, speech detection, recognition, noisy rejection, and grammar processing under various environments”. The applicant would be responsible for developing solutions for the “processing of noisy speech with human voice in the background”, suggesting that the company is planning some form of detection software for use in busy environments, such as the living room.

The rebooted PlayStation Eye camera for the PS4 has been touted as Sony’s answer to Kinect, with voice recognition believed to be among its capabilities. We already know that the device includes a “four channel microphone array”, which would be perfect for this kind of functionality. The question is: do you actually want to talk to your console? Compliments when you’re playing The Last of Us are one thing – but we’re not sure that we fancy asking our system to sync our Trophies every five minutes.

[source linkedin.com, via kotaku.com, uk.ign.com]