What? Yes. Apparently, there is a chip inside the Wiimote that translates speech into data, meaning that either with an addon peripheral or (possible, but doubtful) with the Wiimote itself, you could actually talk to other people, sing in karaoke type games or use speech in applications/games.
The question is though, when will we be seeing this chip start to be utilized? One possible use would be a Wii version of Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? in which there is a part where you need to speak into the mic (of the DS version by the way) in the ‘Stroop test’. The test requires you to say the colour of the word into the mic, if a Wii version of this was released and there’s a distinct possibility due to Big Brain Academy due out soon, then tests that require you to actually speak out loud (besides the reading out loud ‘test’) would be possible on the Wii.
To be specific, it’s an ‘Audio translator’ chip, but what it is capable of is translating human/analogue voice into digital data that can be read by software and I’m quite looking forward as to what it will be used for, there must be something planned or there wouldn’t be any point installing the chip in the first place…