No, it's not another stupid study that claims that video characters actually have feelings or other idiotic things like that (though I am really sure a similar study will be made in the near future if it does not exist already). This one is really serious and it has hit the market already, but I doubt many people know about it: Fonix Speech has developed a technology that allows players to control the in-game action by issuing short verbal commands. Considering the fact that games controlled by our minds are a real possibility and things like that already happen, I am sure we all should be really excited about the future of video gaming.

Basically, the concept is simple and came as a natural response to the gamer's reactions: whenever you play a game, you talk to or yell at the screen, don't you? Until now, that didn't influence the game in any ways, but things are changing quickly, thanks to Fonix Speech, according to a report from desertnews.com:

"Go! Go! Go!" Fonix Speech's IT manager, Joe Shepherd, chimed into a microphone during a demonstration on Monday, and a moment later the characters in his attack group went, went, went. They also followed other commands without question: "Assault!" "Infiltrate!" "Hold position!"

There are already 20 games on the market taking full use of this technology and the commands are pretty varied, having in mind that there are titles who "know" over 70 commands. However, the company wants to take things to the next level and started to work with Ubisoft on the to-be-released Tom Clancy's EndWar, which will accept more voice commands than anybody can imagine. Even more, the voice commands option in EndWar will work both on console and PC versions.

"I've played a lot of these types of games on the PC - you build your army, you command troops - and it works really well with the mouse and the keyboard," Joe Shepherd said. "But they've never really been able to pull it off for the console. And so by adding voice, it's added a whole new dimension, making it work a whole lot better on the console. It's opened up a whole new world."

Yes, everything sounds really interesting. Now I only wish a command like "skip level" would work...