A Pikachu Talks

The Pokémon Company announced yesterday that a Pikachu Talk app for Google Home, Google Home Mini, and Amazon Alexa devices would be launching in Japan this year, RocketNews24 reports. The free app will launch overseas sometime in 2018, to which I say, “Pika!”


Oh, pardon my French, do you not speak Pikachu? That’s too bad, because Pikachu will only be able to converse with you in its native language. So you can ask Pikachu what the weather will be like, and its response will likely be some combination of “pika pikas.” Still, I’ll take it!

I’m hoping that the app will be a lot more responsive than the Nintendo 64 game Hey You, Pikachu!, which let you talk to Pikachu through a microphone and try to befriend it into moving into your house. I was never able to get very far with that game, because it would never listen to me. Before I knew it, time ran out and I had to return the game to Blockbuster. That was 1998, so I’m fairly confident that Pikachu Talk will have better speech recognition technology nearly 20 years later.