Sony might be aiming to make your gaming sessions a little easier by turning your controller into a basic voice assistant.
A newly spotted patent for what could be the PlayStation 5 controller mentions the presence of a microphone on board the peripheral, and goes on to say that “while the user is inputting voice from the microphone, the sound of the speaker is suppressed, and tactile presentation control by the tactile presentation device is performed.”
The mic could tie in to a feature we’ve seen mentioned before – the PlayStation Assist. The patent for the AI-powered voice assistant first popped up last year and sounds like it’ll save you a tonne of time if you often find yourself reaching for your phone when you get stuck mid-gaming session. Described as “a method for gaming assistance” you can ask the PA for help and it will deliver, via a “back-end game assist server.”
It would make sense for the assistant to be always-listening then, in the same way that Alexa or Google Assistant are always eavesdropping, and relying on the player to have a headset with a mic plugged in to access the PA’s functionality isn’t ideal and means it won’t necessarily be used by everyone. The built-in mic seems the obvious solution.
Of course, just because there’s a patent for something, doesn’t mean we’ll see it materialise in the real world, but it’s an interesting feature nonetheless. [TechRadar]
This story first appeared on Gizmodo UK.
2020 version of the criminally under-utilised touch pad.
There’s always gonna be that one device or feature that gets thrown in that’s ‘the way of the future’ that always disappears into the past. Touchpads… Kinects… wiimotes…
More spyware
I really, really don’t want this.
This is the sort of nonsense I’d expect Microsoft to make.
I don’t see why, considering Microsoft has created the perfect controller and Sony still puts out this uncomfortable cheep feeling garbage.
Stop adding things and work on changing it from being the uncomfortable cheap feeling garbage it has always been. Thank glob we can easily get custom xbox style controllers for PS4.
Sony branching out into surveillance capitalism. cool cool.