EA has made 23 more of its accessibility patents free for any studio to use

Electronic Arts has added a further 23 patents to its  ongoing ‘patent pledge’.

The pledge was initially launched in August 2021, with EA offering to share five of its previously protected patents which improved accessibility for players.

This has grown to 15 patents over the past few years, and now a further 23 have been added, bringing the total to 38 patents.

According to EA, any other game developer can use these patents without having to pay any money or risk being sued.

The newly added patents include the following technologies, as described by EA:

• Intelligent Personalized 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.”

As well as the patents, EA has also released an Unreal Engine 5 plugin which enables in-engine use of its photosensitivity analysis tech IRIS, which it open-sourced last year.

“Through our patent pledge, we’re committing that every developer in the industry will be able to use our accessibility-centred technology patents royalty free,” EA’s original patent pledge statement read.

“Anyone can freely use these patents and implement our accessibility-centred IP in their own games to make them more inclusive.

“This pledge covers some of our most innovative technologies designed to break down barriers for players living with disabilities or medical issues. This includes those with vision, hearing, speaking or cognitive issues.”

The full list of patents available can be found on EA’s patent pledge page.