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Football Manager Might Get Siri-Style Voice Recognition

Football’s been a hot topic in gaming recently, so here’s yet another story, this time on Football Manager 2012.

In Football Manager, players must strategically control their team, manage finances and transfers and generally, well, manage a football team. The problem is that you usually see a team’s manager bellowing from the sidelines, while Football Manager players seem to be a bit more on the quiet side. But that soon may change.

An internet blog recently interviewed Miles Jacobson, the studio director for football Manager 2012 developer Sports Interactive, on whether it was viable to add voice control to the game’s interface, meaning players could tell the game which commands they wanted to input verbally. However Jacobson was skeptical towards the inclusion of the feature during the interview. Here’s what he said.

“At the moment, I find the suggestion of adding voice recognition utterly ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future,”

“When you’re playing Football Manager it’s bad enough that you actually cheer at the screen, right? You get funny looks when you do that. Can you imagine if you were talking to your computer quite how ridiculous you would look?

“Are you going to have a new rule in there where you have to wear a suit for the cup final, or else you get a question about it in the press conference?”

Sports Interactive has, however, been relatively good at embracing new ideas in the past, so there may be hope for voice-control fans yet.

“I haven’t tried using Siri. It’s not something that appeals to me personally,” Jacobson said. “But, if somebody told me 10 years ago that we’d be having a 3D match engine, I would’ve laughed at that as well. So, who knows what the future holds?”

Another addition to Football Manager 2012, according to Jacobson, was allegedly some kind of satellite GPS system… I wonder what it was supposed to do?

“There were conversations that we had this year with satellite navigation companies about a feature that we wanted to add that didn’t end up going in. And, again, if you’d asked me about that a few years ago I would’ve laughed.

“That may well be in next year,” he added.

Quite strange tidings from the world of Football Manager. Anyway, the game is in stores now. No voice control.

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