Yeah speech recognition doesn't require a full scale frontier level cloud LLM
You can run something like Whisper https://github.com/openai/whisper locally to transcribe the speech in about 1 second on a MiniPC, then check that for keywords
Then you can use something like Piper https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl to convert the reply back to speech. It's not quite as pretty sounding as something from eg ElevenLabs, but it works - on a mini PC it can handle voice in real time
I use both of those locally to run my own voice assistant for my smart home (indeed, Piper is made by Home Assistant for that exact purpose)
Obviously for a game they'd need more than one Mini PC - but you can scale it up for a lot less than $1k/day!
One caveat on your comment about Whisper: you need a GPU to really let it shine. Using CPU only is not performant, depending on what you are trying to achieve, and how much time you are willing to wait for your results
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u/CalmLotus 1d ago
I don't think you need ai for spoken instructions. (Like yeah- the game may be vibe coded but->)
You just need to find key words for certain actions and extract those from audio input. More work definitely, but would actually be doable for a game.
...wait, Nintendo DS games were already doing that I think. With the built in microphone.