EA makes more patents public in commitment to improve gaming accessibility

As part of its commitment to making gaming as accessible to as many people as possible, EA has pledged 23 new patents to share across the industry via its accessibility portal.

The new patents include tools to help developers run real-time testing for photosensitivity, as well as improvements in speech and audio generation and recognition.

Included amongst the patents is an Unreal Engine 5 plugin that uses EA's photosensitivity analysis tech, IRIS, to "analyse and identify, in real-time as they're running their games, frames that could potentially impact players who experience photosensitivity".

Among the patents added this year are:

• Intelligent Personalised Speech Recognition: Speech recognition system that improves the accuracy and efficiency of speech recognition by using personal phoneme mappings for each user, to better understand accent and other pronunciation variations such as those resulting from speech impairments.
• Generating Expressive Speech Audio From Text Data: A system that generates expressive speech audio from text data, and provides more control and personalization of the generated speech based on desired speaking style and speaker attributes.
• Generating Speech in the Voice of a Player of a Video Game: A system that can generate speech in the voice of a player, for their avatar, based on minimal sample speech data as compared with existing techniques.
• Voice Aging Using Machine Learning: A system that can age an original input voice to a desired target age without requiring additional voice samples.
• Emotion Based Music Style Change Using Deep Learning: A system that infers a player's emotion while playing a video game and tunes the background soundtrack of the game to best fit that emotion.
• Dynamically Selecting Speech Functionality on Client Devices: A system that automatically detects and enables speech recognition technologies available on a gaming device.

"We believe that games should be accessible to everyone and our industry-leading teams are always looking for new ways to make this a reality," said Kerry Hopkins, SVP of global affairs at EA.

"By making this technology available to others, we continue to work to enhance accessibility and inclusivity for players around the world by removing unintended barriers to access."

These latest patents come after EA "opened up" its accessibility tools and technology for "wider use to help gamers" in 2021. Included in the first accessibility patent pledge was Apex Legends' celebrated "ping" system.

In a statement at the time, EA reiterated its commitment to inclusivity by making its accessibility tools available publicly via open source.