I tested Spanish in EchoControl. An accent mark almost broke it

EchoControl currently runs in English only. There's no Spanish version to download yet. The numbers below come from an internal test build, not a shipped feature.

Before I said a single command out loud, I found a bug that would have made the Spanish build practically unusable.

The bug that almost slipped through before any voice test

Every word with an accent mark — á, é, í, ó, ú, ñ — was silently stripped from the command list before recognition even started. In English that bug is invisible, because English barely uses accent marks.

In Spanish, it would have silently broken almost every command that needed one.

I fixed it before running a single voice test. This is exactly why I check for problems like this first: a good accuracy number means nothing if half the commands never loaded correctly to begin with.

What I actually tested

With that fixed, I ran the same kind of test I run for every language and every game. I said every command in the full list out loud, several times each, and checked two things:

  • Did it recognize the right command?
  • Did it ever reject something it should have understood?
A terminal running the Spanish command test tool against Delta Force's intents file, listing 74 intents and 128 distinct phrases to say
The actual test script, mid-run: 74 intents, 128 phrases, one Spanish command list.

The result: 98.2% accuracy against the English version, and not a single command marked as unrecognized.

That number will change as we add more languages and more games — it's a snapshot from the first real test, not a permanent promise. But it shows the same closed-grammar approach works outside English too, which was exactly what I needed to check before saying so in public.

Why this is a business question, not just a technical one

A 98.2% doesn't answer on its own whether it's worth opening up a new language. What it does answer is the question that actually mattered going in: does the engine break once you step outside English, or does it hold up. It holds up. That turns "should we translate EchoControl into Spanish" into a decision about who to sell to and when, not a technical experiment with an uncertain outcome.

The accent-mark bug wasn't a minor footnote either. If it had slipped through unnoticed, the first Spanish accuracy number would have come out low for a reason that had nothing to do with speech recognition — and that kind of failure, the one that makes a technology that actually works look worse than it is, is the hardest to catch after it ships.

Try EchoControl — it already recognizes your game's commands in English today.

See EchoControl in action →