Welcome To The Jungle

Sony debuts "Hey Playstation" voice assistant on the PS5; pondering voice/AI in the metaverse

This Week In Voice VIP is sponsored by Deepgram.

In 2009, Welcome To The Jungle - the Guns and Roses song taken from their appropriately-titled album Appetite For Destruction - was awarded best hard rock song of all time.

They destroyed their competition, along with everything else.

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In a recent update, Sony has now rolled out “Hey Playstation” as an embedded voice assistant within the PlayStation 5.

The conversational AI is designed to enable users to more easily access games, apps, and media from within the dashboard environment of the system.

The feature is in beta, so it’s only available to some users, and all of the functionality of the voice assistant is only in English for the time being.

Interestingly, alongside the voice assistant, Sony is quietly rolling out a separate voice feature: the ability to identify a person by their voice who was saying something inappropriate or profane while in party chat.

Using a system of visual indicators, PS5 users can now identify who was speaking at any point during a conversation taking place on the system. This, in turn, makes it easier for users to report bad conduct on the platform, and for Sony to police it.

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This feature from Sony is the combination of two independent trends: the trend for hardware devices to eventually have their own independent voice AI capability, and a movement toward conduct enforcement and content moderation within online platforms.

There’s no real good reason not to combine both, for video game hardware makers like Sony. And that’s clearly the direction they’re heading.

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The BBC published a short video piece a month ago called What is the metaverse?

The video does a good job answering that question, while raising some others.

I reacted to the video, as part of today’s This Week In Voice Daily video on our YouTube channel.

If you buy that the metaverse is here to stay, and will become relevant to a substantial amount of people, then there’s a great discussion to be had on what voice/AI services will be needed in that environment.

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