A recent job listing has sparked rumors that Sony could be developing voice recognition technology for their upcoming line of PlayStation products. A post discovered on LinkedIn sought candidates for a Speech Recognition Engineering Intern position, as well as someone qualified to work with "speech noise reduction, speech detection, recognition, noisy rejection, and grammar processing under various environments."
The listing calls for someone to assist with "robust speech feature extraction and signal processing for speech enhancement" and "speech enhance and processing of noisy speech with human voice in the background."
It further added that the candidate would need to "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."
It sounds like Sony is really getting serious about voice recognition, the only question now is if it will be a PS4 feature, or meant to be implemented even farther down the line.
Some are speculating that this new information combined with the PlayStation 4 specs released in February point towards a hands free control setup. Sony previously noted that the PlayStation 4 camera would include a "four channel microphone array," which many thought sounded similar to the technology present in Microsoft's Kinect.
Considering the rumors that Microsoft may include Kinect technology built into the next Xbox system, it seems very possible that Sony is moving to compete with their own device.
The PlayStation 4 was announced at a press conference on February 20 earlier this year. It is expected to launch in late 2013, although no solid release date has been provided yet. The console will implement a dedicated GPU, 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, an internal hard drive, an eight core AMD x86-64 processor, a Blu-ray optical drive, and Gaikai-powered cloud based computing support.