Nintendo testing classroom text-to-speech tech with DSis

Nintendo and Japanese telecom company NTT are working together on a voice recognition project, aimed at making it easier for students with hearing or other disabilities to keep up in classrooms.

The project, which NHK reports is undergoing trials in Okinawa and Tottori Prefecture, captures instructor speech, converts it to text, and saves it to the cloud while also sending it to devices — like the DSi. That way, students can read along, and have an automatic record of lessons. See it in action in the video on NHK's site.

The downside to this plan, of course, is that it creates a situation in which a student is expected to be paying very close attention to his or her DS in the back of the classroom — a situation ripe for abuse of the Retro Game Challenge variety.