It's common for video gamers to mutter or yell at their game screens, but more and more, those words are actually helping them play.
Thanks in part to Sandy-based Fonix Speech Inc., gamers can tell their characters what to do rather than machine-gunning their fingers to nubs on the controller buttons.
"Go! Go! Go!" Fonix Speech's IT manager, Joe Shepherd, chimed into a microphone during a demonstration on Monday, and a moment later the characters in his attack group went, went, went. They also followed other commands without question: "Assault!" "Infiltrate!" "Hold position!"
With already more than two dozen game titles using Fonix' VoiceIn technology, the company is awaiting the pending launch of "Tom Clancy's EndWar," which is expected to have a command vocabulary topping any of its previous games, the best of which have a vocabulary of about 70 commands.
