Honours Project

Bringing Speech Recognition to games.

In order to investigate my Dissertation subject “Investigating the impact of integrating voice recognition technology on players’ game experience in First Person Shooter games.”, I have created a game in Unity that featured Azure Cognitive Services, specifically speaking, Azure Speech Recognition.

The game story takes place in a forest and is set at night-time with the player’s character using night vision equipment. The primary aim of the game is to execute the boss soldier that is located in one of the buildings in the main village. Throughout the journey, the player cannot allow the enemy soldiers to raise an alarm. The player wins after killing the prime target and can lose if one of the enemy soldiers has the player’s character in sight for a particular amount of time or spots another enemy soldier that is dead. In the latter case, the alarm is also not raised instantly, but after a very short period of time. In order not to lose, the player must act and kill the suspicious soldier.

Speech Recognition is used to communicate with the in game so-called Ally, a sniper companion for the player that answers player’s questions and executes commands. Since the game is not only about asking questions but also making the player’s speech interact with the Ally, the user can also tell him to kill an enemy to his relative position during missions. For instance, the player can ask Ally to kill the enemy on his left or right or even the one closer or further to him. Apart from that, the player is able to ask the Ally to confirm the target he is aiming at and also their status (alive or dead). Finally, once the player reaches the main village, he is advised to kill the moving enemies first, and then deal with the two soldiers near the campfire. The player can then ‘force’ the Ally to help him with the enemies near the fire first by saying a similar phrase to “Let’s kill enemies near campfire first”. This provides the player with an opportunity to alter the storyline of the game.

Technologies used:
Visual Studio, Unity, C#, Azure Speech Recognition

Project Presentation
Dissertation Paper