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Watchdog lays into Brain Training's voice recognition

No fun for people who don't speak proper, like

Watchdog lays into Brain Training's voice recognition

If you missed last night's BBC consumer affairs programme Watchdog, you missed out on a treat of a report into Brain Training's apparently iffy voice recognition abilities.

Apparently, people with particular regional accents are having trouble with the section of the game that requires you to speak the colour onscreen out loud into the DS microphone.

Their troubles were summed up by Manchester radio DJ Michelle Livesey, who said: "I'm saying, 'blue, blue, blue' and it's saying 'no', even though it was blue. Then it got to yellow. I'm going, 'yeller', and everyone's saying to me you need to be a bit posher. You need to say, 'yellow' and as soon as I did, it picked it up."

The report got off to a bad start, in our opinion, when presenter Nicky Campbell referred to the DS as the "DS Nintendo". A later test of Brain Training's abilities in a noisy street determined that it didn't appear to be any particular regional accent the DS didn't like but more just individual voices. Impressionist Rory Bremner eventually concluded that Brain Training responds best if you speak into it while impersonating Des Lynham or the Queen.

In response, Nintendo says it can help for females to speak in a deeper voice than usual. It also refers players to the game's instruction manual where they're advised to play in a quiet environment, keep the microphone 20-30cm away when speaking and pronounce words as clearly as possible while trying to avoid strong dialects or accents.

The publisher also says it has only received a very small number of complaints from people with regional accents since the game's release three years ago, that this section makes up only a small part of the game and that it is constantly working to improve the performance of its products.

Kath Brice
Kath Brice
Kath gave up a job working with animals five years ago to join the world of video game journalism, which now sees her running our DS section. With so many male work colleagues, many have asked if she notices any difference.