Voice Commands for Strategy Games: Run Your Empire Out Loud

Strategy players think in sentences ("three more farms, then archers on the wall") and then spend the match translating those sentences into hotkeys, build menus and box selections. Neocortex Voice Commands lets them skip the translation: the player says the plan out loud, and your game receives the exact build, train and move orders it already understands. It runs on the player's PC, handles numbers and several orders in one breath, and works alongside an AI advisor who can answer back.

What it looks like

Thornwake is an original medieval strategy game. The player governs Ashford Reach, a river town at the mouth of a contested valley. Winter is six turns away, the granary is low, and scouts have spotted a raiding band coming down from the hills toward the north gate.

The camera is on the riverbank. Instead of opening the build menu, the player holds the talk key:

"Build three farms near the river, queue two workers at the town hall, and send ten archers to the north gate."

That one sentence becomes three orders. The game lays three farm foundations on the free plots by the water, adds two workers to the town hall queue, and pulls ten archers out of the barracks and marches them north. The minimap was never touched. A few seconds later the player adds: "Train four spearmen at the barracks. Send them to the gate too." The word "them" lands on the spearmen just trained, not on the archers already walking.

Then a question the keyboard can't answer. The player isn't sure three farms will be enough, so they ask the town steward, an AI character called Ilsabet Marrow:

Player: Ilsabet, how are we doing on food? Ilsabet: The granary's at a third and falling. Those river farms help from the second harvest, not before. If the raiders camp outside past the thaw, we start rationing.

As she speaks, the granary panel on the town hall glows, because her reply carried an action the game knows how to play. The short orders went to the on-device engine; the question went to the character.

How Neocortex makes it work

• Quantities. "Three farms", "ten archers", "two workers" and "everyone" arrive as numbers, so your game decides which units to pick and how many buildings to place.
• Several orders in one sentence. Build, queue and move can share one breath and still arrive as separate commands, each with its own action and target.
• Natural phrasing. "Build", "put up" and "lay down" can all trigger the same build action, so players talk like a ruler, not like a hotkey chart.
• Context. "Train four spearmen. Send them to the gate." resolves "them" to the spearmen from the previous order.
• On-device and offline. Recognition and matching run on the player's PC. Orders land instantly, with no server, no per-minute cost and no audio leaving the machine.
• Push-to-talk or always listening. A held key suits a tense skirmish; a slow-paced city builder can simply listen.
• Command sets of actors, actions and objects. You design them in the Neocortex dashboard. Actors are unit types and groups ("archers", "workers", "the cavalry", "everyone"), actions are your verbs ("build", "train", "send", "hold", "upgrade"), and objects are buildings and places ("farm", "town hall", "north gate", "the river").
• Multiple languages. Build one command set per language your players speak.

Ilsabet herself is a regular Neocortex AI character. Your game sends the granary, the barracks and the walls as metadata, each with properties such as stored food or garrison size, and adds events like "raiders sighted at the north gate". She answers from that state in her own streamed voice with an emotion tag, and returns actions you authored on her, such as highlight_building, with the building she means as the target. A custom voice for her is available on Pro (5 custom voices) and Team (20).

Ideas to build

RTS micro without the keyboard. Name control groups as actors so the player can say "group one, focus the catapult" or "group two, fall back to the ridge" while their mouse stays on the fight. The hand handles the precise work, the voice handles everything else on the map.

A colony manager. In a survival colony sim, the player says "assign four colonists to hauling and two to the kitchen", or "everyone inside, storm's coming". Quantities carry most of the weight here, and your job system still decides exactly who goes where.

Tower defence between waves. "Upgrade the two towers by the bridge and build a frost tower at the second bend." Then, mid-wave: "Build a cannon at the gate. Now upgrade it." Placing and upgrading by voice leaves the player free to watch the lanes instead of the build bar.

A fleet commander. In a space grand strategy game, "move the third fleet to Kessa and set it to blockade" and "build two frigates at the Orrin yards" turn a sprawl of panels into a couple of sentences. Pair it with an admiral character who answers "what's the threat on the border?" from the events you send, and the galaxy starts to feel staffed.

Building it

Neocortex Voice Commands runs inside PC games on the player's machine. Each matched command maps onto the order system your strategy game already has, so voice becomes one more way to issue the orders that mouse and hotkeys already issue.

1. List your verbs and nouns. Write down every order the player can give (build, train, move, hold, upgrade, research), who receives it, and what it can target.
2. Design a command set in the Neocortex dashboard with unit types and groups as actors, orders as actions, and buildings and map locations as objects, plus a few example phrases for each.
3. Add Neocortex Voice Commands to your game and route each matched command into your existing order queue, using the quantity to decide how many units to select or buildings to place.
4. Decide what happens when the numbers don't add up. If the player asks for ten archers and has six, send six and say so, or let the advisor point it out. This is your game's call, and players notice when it is handled well.
5. Add an advisor character in the Neocortex visual editor with a personality, a voice and actions such as highlighting a building. Send economy and army state as metadata and recent happenings as events, through the Web API or an engine SDK.
6. Add a command set per language your players speak.

One small tip: show each recognised order as a short line of text for a second or two ("Farm x3, near the river"). Players trust voice control much faster when they can see what the game heard, and it doubles as a quick way to spot phrasings your command set is missing.

Voice Commands is a licensed SDK: contact us for a Voice Commands license. AI characters such as the advisor, and the API they run on, are included in every plan, Free among them.

Strategy orders are one entry in our AI NPC, ambient AI and voice command use cases. For faster genres read voice commands for squad tactics and voice-activated spells and abilities, and see the voice-controlled gaming page. The interactables docs show how to describe buildings and stockpiles to an advisor. Start with one build order and one unit type, and add verbs as players reach for them.

Checked October 2026.

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