How does Wii Speak work?

Katsuya Eguchi, Producer of the Animal Crossing: City Folk:

“There’s some noise filtering going on. It’s designed to pick up stuff other than what’s coming out of the TV. If you put this on your TV, if this was a regular microphone, you’d get your TV sound going in. But this is a USB plug-in. So the sound coming out of your TV is going into the Wii Speak, and when it goes back into the Wii, it throws that sound away.

“We really don’t consider ourselves ‘anti-voice-chat.’ One of the things we’ve said for years now is that we’ve wanted to provide a safe environment that people didn’t feel nervous about going into. With games like Mario Kart and Smash Bros., because you can play against anybody, rivals or whoever’s out there, and they’re games where tempers can be frayed and people might use language that’s not appropriate for everyone to hear, we didn’t feel that those titles were appropriate to have a voice-chat feature. However, with Animal Crossing, you’re going to be chatting with your friends. There’s no Animal Crossing “rivals” or any sort of open gameplay like that. So we figured that as long as people have registered each other as their friends and they’re comfortable with that, then we’re fine giving them the ability to chat with each other.”



Around The Net:


  • http://www.youtube.com/rothsothy Roth

    Just as I had suspected! Wii Speak’s technology works just like Skype voice chat.
    This is a big +1UP for one and the other is you don’t have to wear any extra accessory on your head.
    \:D/

    // Roth

  • Surgical Precision

    Damn… Man do I ever feel dumb for not figuring that out… >_-

    But still if there not going to be making it compatible with the kinda games I actually like to play then I just don’t see any point in getting this…

    Someone wake me up once nintendo retracts this statement & makes a patch for SSBB…

  • Collapse

    i agree with you, surgical precision, 100%. brawl needs voice communication

  • dark-saito

    Sakurai said there may be some additional updates in the site iin the future. possibly wiispeak compatibility for brawl? that would be amazing e.e

  • KSKI

    Please make Wii Speak compatible with Mario Kart!

  • sherrie

    Can u please make Wii speak work with Wii fit

  • Buck

    Can you please make wii speak compatible with Mario Kart????

  • chris

    make it compatible for COD5 to

  • abby

    wait,so its a usb? but the wii doesnt have any usb ports!