Playing Games With Your Voice: Practical Tips for Any Room

Why play with your voice?

Most games are controlled with fingers on a screen. Voice games add a different kind of play: you talk, sing, count or read aloud, and the game reacts. It sounds simple, but it changes how a game feels. You can play while your hands are busy, you move around the room, and you naturally take breaks to breathe.

Voice play also helps people for whom tapping is hard, such as some players with limited hand movement or with tired wrists after a working day. And for language learners, a game that rewards speaking out loud is a small daily push to practise pronunciation without fear of mistakes.

How these games usually listen

Many voice games do not try to understand your words at all. They measure how loud the sound is, and sometimes whether it sounds like a human voice, many times a second. That is enough to know that you are speaking. It also means you can say anything you like: read a page of a book, describe your day, count numbers or practise a new language. Our article on how websites detect your voice explains the difference between loudness, voice detection and speech recognition.

Set up your microphone

• Allow the microphone only for the game's own site, and check the icon in the address bar.
• Keep the phone 20 to 40 centimetres from your mouth. Closer often sounds distorted; further away picks up the room.
• Do not cover the microphone hole with your fingers or a phone case. On most phones it sits at the bottom edge.
• Wired or Bluetooth headsets with a microphone near the mouth work very well in noisy places. Check in the browser's site settings which microphone is in use.
• If the game does not react at all, read our guide to fixing a microphone that is not working in the browser.

Playing in a noisy room

Background noise such as a television, a fan or traffic can confuse a loudness meter. The game may think you are speaking when you are not, or it may not notice you over the noise.

• Turn the phone so the microphone points towards you and away from the noise.
• Speak in a normal, clear voice instead of shouting. Steady speech is easier to detect than short loud bursts.
• A headset microphone close to your mouth is the single biggest improvement in loud places.
• If a game lets you choose a sensitivity, raise it in quiet rooms and lower it in loud ones.

Playing in a shared home

Talking to a game in a room full of people needs a bit of thought. A few minutes of reading aloud is fine on a sofa, but not at midnight next to someone who is asleep.

• Pick your times: short sessions during the day work better than long ones late at night.
• Use a quiet voice close to the microphone rather than a loud voice far away.
• Never play voice games while driving, cycling or crossing a road. Your attention belongs on the road.
• In public places such as buses, libraries or offices, keep voice play for later.

Take care of your voice

Speaking for a long time is real physical work. Teachers, call-centre staff and singers know this well. The same simple rules protect a player's voice.

• Drink water and take short breaks. Many voice games already use an energy bar that asks you to rest.
• Do not whisper hard or shout for long. Both strain the voice more than calm speaking.
• Stop if your throat hurts or your voice becomes hoarse, and rest it for the day.
• Mix voice play with other activities instead of talking for hours at a time.

Fun things to say

If you run out of words, try reading a news article or a short story aloud, practising tongue twisters, describing what you can see out of the window, counting in another language, or retelling the plot of a film. Children can read their school book aloud, which turns homework practice into play.

Fair play with voices

Some players try to replace their voice with a recording or a speaker playing noise. Good games treat that as cheating, because it gives an advantage nobody else has. It also misses the point: the game is meant to be played by you. Keep it honest and enjoy the progress you made yourself.