"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."

Fonix Speech, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fonix Corp., has opened new worlds in video-game speech recognition in recent years. In addition to games in which characters follow voice commands, the company's technology in "Rock Band" and "High School Musical: Sing It" judges the vocal and instrument-playing talent of the gamer. The company's technology is featured in games used on PCs and a variety of console platforms: Nintendo Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStations 2 and 3.

One reason that game developers select Fonix's VoiceIn technology is its conservative use of processor power and memory, allowing the game developers to concentrate on better graphics and other elements. "With all these graphics and everything else going on, there's not a lot of room to take a lot of processing away from that," Lynn Shepherd said.

Fonix Speech's niche also has been strengthened by its technology's accuracy, he said.

"In a game environment, you've got people talking softly, yelling, perhaps people talking in the background. What makes the task especially difficult is dealing with those and maintaining accuracy. And that is the one area where our technology has excelled — not only the ability to run on all these platforms but the ability to perform in these very noisy environments," he said.

Today's video game speech technology has come a long way from early versions, which Lynn Shepherd acknowledges "didn't work very well."

The sophistication of today's technology is helping it become more accepted in the game marketplace.

"Now we've got technology that works well, we've got new users willing to use it and to try it. It's a new generation, basically, and that's a significant piece of the game market. With a new generation, a younger generation grows up with speech becoming part of their user environment, he said.

Video games will pave the way for more speech-recognition technology all around, he predicted. That's important to Fonix Speech. While video games represent about 30 percent of the company's business, its technology is used in mobile and wireless devices, toys and appliances, computer telephony systems and other markets. Several states use it in their telephone 5-1-1 traffic and tourism information offerings.

"The game market will drive a lot in that (overall) area," Lynn Shepherd said.

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E-mail: bwallace@desnews.com