There is difficulty in primarily requiring keyboard use in mobile gaming apps. But if one could replace the keyboard with voice recognition. Would this be a game-changer for mobile parser games?
Driving in your car, having the story content read to you, awaiting your next command. The ability to play the Lost Treasures of Infocom on a long trip.
Is this on any product development horizon? Just curious.
There have been a few experiments in this vein, but I’m not aware of any really taking off. The difficulty is that IF parsers tend to be very specific in the input they expect, so mis-hearing is a big problem, and often they include weird names or words that aren’t common in standard English.
There were also some experiments in using voice controls for choice games, picking between a list of options, but I’m not aware of any of those really taking off either.
There was an Alexa skill for this, but that was a commercial thing, as is the whole Alexa platform. Still, there are a few games that you can play over an Alexa if you have one, including Zork I.
Voice recognition is built into iOS and has been since day one. I think Android too but I don’t have any experience with that.
Back when I was shipping iOS IF apps, I tested with VoiceOver and made sure the game was fully playable. Unfortunately iOS Hadean Lands is very unsupported now – it still runs, and you can still use VoiceOver, but something changed about the API and it no longer reads out new text after each input. (You can still hear the recent text by running your finger up the screen.)
This was the whole deal of RYFT: A Timely Manor (Parley Games, 2025; website, IFDB, forum thread). I dunno how that’s getting along (not tried it myself).
I’d imagine it would be really hard to maintain game state, map, etc. in your head without an easy way to consult them.
Although if you can integrete dictation at a lower level you can actually leverage that fact, so the software “prefers” to hear well-formed commands referring to objects in scope.
Lots of scope for quality-of-life aids to this though! Hadean Lands, Bronze, and Kerkerkruip come to mind. If the game can pathfind to a given location, recall locations of objects, rooms seen, get a list of unexplored exits, and maybe recall the state in which you left various mechanisms, there’s not a lot of need to go through your history or take notes. Only if mapping is itself the puzzle does this kind of feature ruin it.
I’m fooling with this now and it’s basically perfect. My usual typo per command ratio is higher than the rate it’s misheard me at. Interestingly it recognizes parser abbreviations like X (which I wasn’t initially sure it would).
But on the minus side, it turns out I read pretty fast and am not that patient with listening to narration, even at 1.5x speed.