In a lengthy report by NintendoWorldReport on Takeshi Shimada's talk at the Game Developer Conference, the middleware dev sorta mentions that his company is looking into the possibility of developing some sort of text-to-speech technology.

He highlighted a development tool called NintendoWare, developed by Nintendo and HAL, that emulates Wii hardware on the PC so that artists can view an accurate representation of their special effects without loading their code onto a Wii development kit. He also noted that his group is working on easy-to-incorporate fur-shading middleware and predictive input (so the game can guess what you're about to do based on prior motion). NCL is also looking into the utility of text-to-speech for Wii.

How weird would that be? My first thought was of Speak and Spell, but of course technology has improved quite a bit since then. Wouldn't it be neat if a game could automatically insert your real name into the dialog or plot in the voice acting? Brian Crecente

Takeshi Shimada's GDC 2007 Presentation [Nintendo World Report, via Definitive Nintendo Revolution Speculation]

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