610 DEAR.BEN

A new frontier for the venerable text game ADVENTURE: replacing the typed-in text parser with a more conversational one that uses voice recognition to understand what you tell it, and speech synthesis to tell you what it thinks of that. The game design remains unchanged from that used over three decades ago, but its method of delivery was unthinkable at the time of its original implementation.To reiterate: this game is the story of a cave explorer, adventuring through a magical, treasure-filled complex of caverns (patterned after the real-world Mammoth Cave complex in Kentucky). The complex is strewn with hazards and obstacles, and the challenge is to map it out, overcome its puzzles and one particularly devious maze, and return above ground with all the treasures hidden away.This particular implementation originated as a telephone gateway to the game (its name referencing the phone number you can dial to play it, verbally) but following a Skype hookup, its developers continued enhancing the play experience and developed three separate applications to interface with their phone-bridge'd text adventure game and enhance play with photo-illustrations and navigational shortcuts: the first was the aptly-named "Dearben Lite" for the iPod Touch, then "Adventure SR" (for Speech Recognition) on the iPhone, and finally "Adventure SRT" (for Speech Recognition: Tablet version) for the iPad. The next frontier for the developers is to incorporate Google Translate to present a fully-narrated version of the first text adventure in up to 44 languages.