Wii Speak
microphone accessory for Nintendo's Wii video game console
The Wii Speak is a microphone accessory for Nintendo's Wii home video game console. Connected to the console via USB, the device can be placed near the video display, which allowed voice chat to be conducted within entire rooms across multiple households. The device features an LED indicating when the microphone is active.
The Wii Speak was announced at Nintendo's 2008 E3 media briefing. It was released on its own, as well as in a bundle alongside Animal Crossing: City Folk, on November 16, 2008 in North America, and on December 5, 2008 in Europe.
The Wii Speak accessory was succeeded by the embedded microphone on the Wii U's GamePad controller. Nevertheless, the Wii Speak hardware remains compatible with the same games that were previously compatible with the Wii on Wii U.
Design
According to Shigeru Miyamoto, the microphone was designed to "clearly capture many different voices being spoken in a room at the same time and convey that over the Internet." Addressing concerns over background noise due to the placement of the microphone near a television set, Animal Crossing: City Folk producer Katsuya Eguchi stated that the device was designed to filter out video game sound from the audio speakers. Miyamoto noted at the time that the quality of the noise filtering functionality in the Wii Speak is "very good", which may have contributed to the cost of the device. An on/off switch was originally planned, but the microphone was ultimately designed to only turn on when a compatible game wants access to it.
Software
In addition to the standalone accessory, the Wii Speak was also made available as a bundle alongside Animal Crossing: City Folk.
“Wii Speak” enters the record as microphone accessory for Nintendo's Wii video game console. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Speak, microphone and accessory can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1353567. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wii Speak” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.