Microsoft has confirmed to Eurogamer Spain that the company’s controller-free gaming device, Kinect, will only be able to recognise three distinct languages at launch, with voice recognition support for other languages to be added with a patch in the ‘Spring’ of 2011.

Kinect will be able to understand only English (US and UK), Japanese and Spanish (Mexican) when it releases in early November around the world, which you would think covers a good majority of the console playing world.

But then you wouldn’t be taking into consideration a vast portion of mainland Europe, what with languages such as German, Italian, French, Spanish (Spain), Finnish and many more, as well as all of the different regional dialects.

It gets worse.

In a peculiar move, Kinect’s voice recognition will be locked to the same region as your Xbox 360. This means that, even if you live in Germany and you speak fluent English, you won’t be able to take advantage of Kinect’s English voice recognition.

It gets worse.

Even if you live in other traditionally English-speaking countries, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, you won’t be able to make use of the English voice recognition, due to the fact that the device currently only supports US and UK English.

The same goes for Spanish, as only gamers in Mexico (and not Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries) will be able to use the Spanish voice recognition.

‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’ is probably the only safe pair in this whole tangle.

Hopefully, either something has been lost in translation (…) and some (or all) of this information is incorrect, or Microsoft will try and rectify the situation sooner rather than later (in the ‘Spring’ of 2011).

Naturally, you can still have tons of fun with Kinect and Kinect games without voice recognition, but when one of the key features of the device was the ability to interact with your Xbox 360 using voice input, as well as interact with games by speaking, some of the charm will be lost.

Source: Eurogamer