Star Trek: Bridge Crew's New IBM Watson Support Lets You Command Crewmates With Your Voice

Star Trek: Bridge Crew aims to let you live out a fantasy of captaining the USS Enterprise, and today that dream just got a bit closer to reality. Ubisoft has announced that the game now has experimental support for the IBM Watson question-answering system. In essence, this means that you're able to order around your crewmates with your voice.

In a press release, Ubisoft announced that the game will support Watson's speech-to-text and Conversation functionality. This support will be in an "experimental beta period" for a currently unspecified amount of time, but it's live right now on all platforms--Vive and Oculus Rift on PC, and PlayStation VR on PS4.

Bridge Crew already has full-body avatars and real-time lip-syncing. According to Ubisoft, Watson works with these features to make playing with AI crewmates better and more natural. As the press release explains, "IBM Watson services can be used to operate crews consisting of only AI characters or a mix of AI characters and human teammates without breaking immersion."

Now, the press release states, the game "let[s] players use their voice and natural-language commands to interact with their virtual Starfleet crew members for the ultimate authentic voyage into the final frontier." You can see a trailer for the new functionality above.

After several delays, Bridge Crew released last month on PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive. In our 6/10 review, GameSpot critic Justin Clark wrote, "When the game is at its best, the spirit of cooperation between various asymmetrical elements is encouraging--even special. In every other regard, however, Bridge Crew is forgettable the second you pull out of VR."

Disclosure: GameSpot's parent company, CBS, owns the rights to Star Trek.