Applying speech interface to Mahjong game

Computer game development has raised many challenges to the computer science. Among them, human computer interaction and networking are two fundamental aspects. We propose a multi-player game framework with a speech interface based on existing speech synthesis and recognition engines. To study this framework, we have implemented a popular and historic Chinese game Mahjong. We describe the implementation by its speech interface, networking, and graphics user interface (GUI). We conducted experiments over the Internet. Four Pentium III 450 MHz PCs (128MB RAM and 4GB hard disk) were used with one PC taking the roles as the server and client at the same time. The speech interface has proven to enhance the human computer interaction as reported by the participants.