Speech-to-whimsically-colored-text
Nintendo, attempting to maintain their family-oriented image, has taken great caution to avoid standard voice chat in their online offerings...at least between people not firmly established as friends. Services such as Xbox Live might embrace the liberal cursing of prepubescent punks, but in a purely audio-based communciation system, it's almost impossible for a system to filter out profanity in real-time.
According to my mother's sister's friend's uncle an IGN Insider forum poster (who has some street cred, thanks to a previous accurate analysis of the internal Wiimote speaker) and a recent patent, Nintendo will be implementing a speech-to-text program to avoid such problems. In addition to standard word recognition, the program will also register the tone and volume of your voice to change the text into various sizes and colors. "STFU n00b" will be in red, presumably.
By converting audio data to simple text, the Wii will very easily be able to filter and/or change any words that are flagged in the system. Hopefully, the system will allow parents and users to modify the filters, and perhaps just give an optional regular voice-to-voice setting as well.
[via Joystiq]
