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PlayStation, on!
A job listing suggests that Sony could be prepping new voice recognition support for PlayStation products. A post on LinkedIn from April 30, 2013 advertises a “Speech Recognition Engineering Intern” and is seeking a candidate to assist in “speech noise reduction, speech detection, recognition, noisy rejection, and grammar processing under various environments.”
Specifically, the listing is seeking someone to handle “robust speech feature extraction and signal processing for speech enhancement” and “speech enhance and processing of noisy speech with human voice in the background.” A candidate would “engage some initial research off signal separation and neural network processing,” “run evaluation and research on keyword spotting” and “conduct some experiment on robust small vocabulary CSR with noisy speech.”
The listing is especially interesting given the PlayStation 4 eye specs Sony released in February, noting that the camera includes a “four channel microphone array.” Considering the voice recognition features included in Microsoft’s Kinect, Sony could be squaring off against that peripheral head-on by including its own hands-free controls in its upcoming console.
It’s worth noting that the job listing does not specifically mention PlayStation 4 and could potentially be for a feature meant to be integrated into PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita (which also includes a microphone) or even PlayStation Mobile. Even if it is for PlayStation 4, there’s also no guarantee that it will be included when the system launches this holiday season.
We’ve reached out to Sony about the listing and will update this story with any comment we receive.
