Back when Kinect launched in Australia, it was missing one very important feature in Australia – voice controls. Adam Pollington, Xbox Category Manager from Microsoft told us last November that it would be available by early Feb/late March, and was delayed due to the Aussie accent. Mark over at Kotaku has discovered that there seems to be something else causing the delay.Mark managed to speak to someone who was involved in the actual trialling of the voice control software for Kinect. The thing is, this person was part of the trial that started back in May 2010, which was conducted by a company called Appen. When Mark contacted Appen about the trial, they told him that the testing had finished back in November last year – or right about the same time the Kinect launched.
Given the trial finished in November, you can give Microsoft some leeway in being able to crunch the data, condense it into a firmware update and roll it out to customers. But it’s been six whole months.
What gives Microsoft? Why won’t you release a feature that should have launched six months ago?
[Kotaku]