Quick Look: There Came an Echo

Awesome way to start a day off, Thanks guys

Did you mean?

@vinny Did you finally get that sound-cancelling-whatever in the studio?

Is Corrin voiced by Wil Wheaton?

Edit: Oh yeah looks like it is

Have not even watched this, yet I LIKE the idea in theory!

It's intriguing to see the difference in the voice recognition between this and Bot Colony. I wonder why there's such a variation in how effective they are?

There Came an Echo had some moments during the tower defense section where it didn't pick up what Vinny said, but it was also quite good at giving feedback like 'speak louder!'.

@hammondoftexas: I believe so, yeah.

HAMBOOGER

Morning quick looks are the best way to start the day. =)

Same studio that made Sequence a few years ago. I have some high hopes for this.

@squiggle said:

I can't say for sure, but I'd guess that it has something to do with Bot Colony being a Canadian developed game, and this game being developed in California. The both probably use external servers to process the voice data, so maybe it's not the case, but I imagine the default accents are calibrated differently.

Also, Vinny messed up the voice calibration in Bot Colony, I think he even forgot to select the voice profile he made.

Edit: Is the brightness turned wayyy up in this recording, or is this just the game? I feel like my eyes are off a bit looking at it.

The Bot Colony devs specifically claimed that the game would work with any type of English dialect, and even envisioned the game to be used as an ESL learning tool, so accents shouldn't have been a problem at all.

And Vinny did screw up the calibration, but almost every other person who reviewed that game (and calibrated correctly) had very similar "results".

I don't think the atrocious application of voice commands in that game was circumstantial, but it's awesome to see it employed pretty well in games like this one.

I can confirm that this works pretty much flawlessly. Didn't have the problems Vinny had during the TD sequence either.

Ah, those are interesting points. The calibration might have been a bit better for Echo!

It does look very bright, but I think it might be a design decision?

PICK UP

THE PEPPER

GRINDER

Neat game play idea, but the tone of the dialogue is a big turn-off for me.

On my mark, everyone take out your fun guns. HAMBOOGER

Im curious why these voice recognition games lately do all the processing wprk remotely. Does it require considerably more power than the average user's PC to interpret voice commands? I onow i'm probably being stupid and missing why it can't just all be done locally.

I first saw this and was like, meh. Then Vinny said, it's like X-Com, but you use your voice. Vinny and voice commands is one of the best things on Giant Bomb.

@august:

totally missed a chance to make an alias for "mark" to be that.

Also, the reason why the recognition works better in this, because its not trying to match the word to whole english dictionary from what is said, just the dozen or so words used in the game.

Also, immediately noticed Saint's Row FemBoss 1 / Rise / Laura Bailey as Miranda. And jeez, that's a high profile cast there.

Game of Pricks, coming soon to HBO

This seems like it's sort of a quasi-sequel to Sequence. The music is similar, main character was named Ky, and your "Support" girl in that game was Naia, I'm pretty sure. That wasn't a very good game, but it was way different than this.

Worth noting that game was also full of sarcasm that wasn't particularly witty.

Wil Wheaton and Laura Bailey together at last

This looks perfectly competent and I honestly quite like the dialogue.

Might have to give this one a go, if just for the great voice talent involved.

At first look I thought this was some sort of Ghostbusters riff.

The tech seems quite good but I think its wasted on a game like this where the pace seems a bit hectic. A slower paced game with multiple attacks and RPG like system would have been better or maybe even an RTS game like COH even.

I am sorry, but this seems very bad : /

Hambooger!

HAMBOOGER.

Very impressed with the voice recognition, especially the custom mapping, hope the game gets a follow up.

Hambooger

I'm pretty sure the problem (or one of the major ones at least) with Bot Colony was that they actually ran a full speech-to-text thing, loaded up with a full English dictionary, so the game would "recognize" a whole lot of words that had no actual use in the game (such as the moment when it thought Vinny had said "Vegan on the weekends" out of nowhere), whereas There Came An Echo has a specific command list with set phrases, all distinct and with distinct character names in order to minimize the risk of confusing similar sounding names and words.

Is Rick Dyer behind this trend towards voice control in video games? Has he finally returned to Earth to reveal the next video generation?

Will all future video games take the control out of our hands and put it into our mouth?

Just want to say thanks to the team who put this out for free on neogaf a few days back. Ive been excitedly screaming BOOM SHAKALAKA to switch my guns.

I am waiting for one of these characters to yell

"BUT MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM"

I'm almost impressed by this software

A high-profile cast...

...and Ashley Burch.

Ashly Burch was phenomenal in Persona Q. Totally sells the heart of that story.

You know who that is. Isn't that the definition of high profile?

He's playing off a joke Vinny says in this QL. A really funny joke.

Seems like a great game to play couch co-op just to grief each other.

I knew this godawful dialog felt familiar. They developed Sequence as well, which had the same issue.

A game completely controlled by my voice. That sounds like fun for about 5 minutes. I'm all for a cool sci-fi story, but not if I have to verbally persuade the game the entire time.

You know, if the voice recognition is as good as Vinny claims, I think I might like this game, and I have no issues about talking to play it.

This looks kind of amazing! i would like to see more from this from the GBeast. I feel they can really make excellent content with their own made up commands.