It’s been a year since I joined Doppio as a product manager, and I couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come.
I believe in the company’s vision that voice technology and Natural Language Processing enables developers to create radically new games - games that have never been made before.
Jules Baculard is the Product Manager for Doppio
Here are five ways in which voice-first games are unique in the gaming landscape.
1. Voice is emotional, and makes for a strong immersion in the game
You profess your love to a character and see them smile and accept your advances. You cast a magic spell and witness the formation of the thunderstorm you just conjured. Contrary to the pressing of a button, the use of voice as an input feels natural, and it makes these two experiences tremendously more immersive, leaving you as a player all the more engaged. Voice conveys emotion in a way that touch can’t, and for that reason it builds a deeper connection between gamers and their games.
This emotional connection through voice is something we feel as players, but also something we actively design for as developers. In our first game, The Vortex, some of our players say “I love you” to the game’s robots. Insults are also very common, which drove us to write a variety of witty answers, so our characters can talk back to players when insulted. This kind of iteration enables us to create those enchanting moments where the game surprises the player by handling unexpected requests, creating the illusion of conversation with a real person.
2. Great voice games are magical: say what you want and it works
For a conversation with an AI to seem real, the player has to feel that whatever they might say will be understood by the game. Great voice games can make both the controls and the UX intuitive by nature: say what you want and it works!
This feeling the user has that they could say anything and the game would understand them, react to what they said, contributes to the voice games’ magic moments. Nevertheless, as is the case with all magic tricks I daresay, magic here is the product of clever design and hard work. As voice developers, we put a lot of work into Voice User Interface (VUI) design. What that means is that by analyzing what users say in each of the game’s interactions, and by designing those interactions so that they point users to desirable things to say, we ensure that the game will handle most of our users’ inputs. Therefore, clever VUI design leads to users feeling like they could say anything, while in reality we as designers make sure that the limited amount of things we handle captures the majority of user needs, and their associated inputs. That’s how the magic is created.
Europa Universalis 4 makes heavy use of visual UI (Source: Reddit)
3. Voice solves traditional control and UX problems
Voice games are thus very intuitive to use, and that has tremendous implications for software user experience: there is less need for users to learn a software’s complex UI before being able to use it. Instead, users literally voice their needs, and it falls on the developer to adapt and provide a solution. Think of how simpler Excel would be, if you could just ask it to do something rather than having to crawl through its countless tabs of complex icons and concepts, most of which aren’t related to your use case.
Games are complex software products, and as such most of them rely heavily on graphical UI for users to manage that complexity. Whether it’s a complex strategy game (Europa Universalis), or a simpler action-focused game (Call of Duty), many make heavy use of menus and icons, and are ultimately limited by screen space and a need for clarity.
From a practical, user experience perspective, voice brings two benefits. One, the controls are more intuitive, making using the software frictionless: players can start playing directly by saying things. For example, to build a barrack in a game of Civilization, users could say “build a barracks” or “I want to recruit soldiers”, and the game will offer that option. Second, since voice controls do not depend on UI elements to be clicked on, voice games have more screen space to display other things.
4. Voice enables a hands-free gaming experience, and as such widens the accessibility of games
Although it might seem obvious, it’s worth pointing out another key difference between voice and touch based gameplay: voice doesn’t require the use of one’s hands. Therefore, it opens up environments and activities traditionally incompatible with gaming. Users playing a screenless voice game can play in the car while driving, or even while doing other activities such as cooking.
The hands-free nature of voice games also opens the gaming experience to people traditionally excluded from video games, such as players with visual impairments, slow reflexes, or motor impairments. Moreover, by relying on audio and voice, we allow players who aren’t literate to engage with our games: the ability to read isn’t a prerequisite!
We believe a new cohort of users will start playing games through voice gaming and voice assistants, and we’re actively trying to figure out what games would meet the needs of that new audience.
5. Multimodal unlocks new opportunities for voice games
Nevertheless, despite the fact that voice games nowadays are mostly screenless and do not rely on visuals, we believe that the hands-free nature of voice gaming can be used to build even richer multimodal experiences. Combining visuals and traditional video game controls with voice would open up new avenues for game design to explore. As a matter of fact this isn’t science-fiction, it has already been done: in Bioware’s Mass Effect 3 (2012), Kinect players were able to use voice commands to control most of their characters’ actions in real time, making for a more fluid combat experience. This experience, however, required custom hardware, and the voice recognition didn’t work well at times. The recent advances in voice technology, together with the ubiquity of voice recognition hardware (smartphones, smart speakers), means that even better experiences can be made available to a lot more people today.
Conclusion
Developing for voice enables a fresh perspective on design, allowing us to enhance games through a strong emotional connection with the player; a user experience literally dictated by the user to the developer, instead of the other way around; and all of this while opening new creative avenues to be explored.
We’re still just scratching the surface of what voice gaming will look like in the future here at Doppio, and we’re really excited about it. I hope reading this article got you excited too!