Innovative? Yes, Useful? No, Fun? So-so, Voice Recognition? Needs Work!
The voice recognition of the game is well implemented and able to recognize most of the daily words. However, there are still A LOT of common words that Talkman cannot recognize. You will get frustrated when you try to pronouce the word again and again but MAX (the blue bird) still cannot understand what you said.
For the talk mode, you can select different situation and pick up some phrases for MAX to pronounce. You can also use for voice to "select" possible match for your phrases. Basically, the game tries to pick up a keyword from your voice input and generates a sentence.
The game mode includes a pronunciation game and a listening game. Both of them are fun to play with but the fact is that the software cannot distinguish small difference in pronunication. For example, I tried to pronounce a phrase in Chinese with a word changed. The Talkman still ranked me "A" although I am saying another word, we can know that the software still need a big improvement on voice recognition. It's still a fun game though.
The game also comes with unit change system and the friend list. They're useful if you want to know about the temperature, length, and currency change. Lastly, I want to mention about the Alarm Clock mode, it's very fun because you have to answer MAX's question in order to make the alarm stops. MAX will pronounce a phrase in different language and you have to match the meaning of the phrase.
In conclusion, don't spend money on it if you want to learn a different language. Language school will be always better than Talkman. It's a handy device if you're travelling to Asian countries. It's worth to pick up the game if you just want to learn some daily used phrases without knowing the basic grammar.