Spong.com has gotten the following reaction from Microsoft on rumors that Kinect may not launch with voice control in November:

Voice control is an exciting part of the ‘Kinect for Xbox 360’ controller-free experience and we can confirm that it will be available at launch in November 2010. Only on Xbox 360 will you be able to navigate the Kinect Hub using your voice to control your movies, TV Shows and music. We do not have additional details to share about local voice availability at this time.

Myth – busted.

My guess is, that they will recognize the English language at launch, and others local variations will be send on update later on – no official news yet though.

UPDATE: My guess was almost right, Microsoft disables voice control for mainland Europe (not UK) and French Canadians till spring 2011, see this post.

Dashboard video

For those of you wondering what the dashboard looks like, checkout this video:

Original message

Microsoft has confirmed to MCV that Kinect will not boast the dashboard voice control functionality at launch in November this year. Speaking at Gamescom, marketing manager for Xbox Live EMEA Robin Burrowes stated that “we will be announcing when voice control will be turned on in due course”. Earlier, on E3 for example, demonstrations of Kinect had depicted users switching between various functions and selecting media on Xbox 360 by simply telling the console what it was they wanted it to do. The peripheral will also be able to recognise the voices of individual users. My guess is they leave it out for now because it has to work with about every dialect around the world: this takes loads of testing and time.

Will this hurt pre-orders? It is a feature that may be very interesting for hardcore gamers that want to be amongst the first owners of the device.

Not to worry though, it will come and it is possible with Kinect! But taking out features that were announced is not a good move by Microsoft. However, the question remains which is worse: not putting it in at launch or putting in a feature that is not polished at launch? The latter may even hurt Kinect more in the long run, as then all the reviews would have been written and the minds of people would have been made up. Furthermore, think of the frustrations that people may have if the voice control is not up to par.

Expect the voice features in games like Kinectimals – as no voice control has only been confirmed for the dashboard.