A new patent from Nintendo seems to suggest that voice chat will be better implemented into Switch 2, finally overcoming one of our biggest complaints with ‘Switch 1’ (thanks, Wccftech).
The patent was filed back in November 2024 before being published by the United States Patent Application Office late last month. The main thrust of the text and diagrams appears to outline something akin to in-game proximity chat, or as the summary confusingly puts it, when “the sound heard by the user can be gradually switched from the sound acquired by the residual virtual microphone at the position before movement to the sound acquired by the virtual microphone at the current position”. Nice and clear, eh?
Naturally, proximity chat has been a feature of online gameplay for years, but the Nintendo patent seems to be all about making the experience of “an abrupt change of sound output” less jarring for the player. There’s a bunch of the usual confusing patent-talk within, but it’s mostly about the gradual decrease/increase of sound from two virtual microphones before/after movement, as shown in the following diagrams:
While we didn’t spot any specific mention of how the voice chat would be implemented in the first place, our fingers are crossed that the very suggestion of developments in proximity chat tech from Nintendo implies that the company is looking to improve the feature on Switch 2. ‘Switch 1’ has been fantastic, but we can’t help but feel supremely behind the times when we’re forced to hop on a separate call with our friends to play together online — because come on, who’s really using the Nintendo Switch Online mobile app for that?
As with all patents, it’s worth packing all of the above speculation tentatively into the ‘Hopes and Dreams’ drawer. Nintendo has patent applications approved all the time, sometimes for technology it’s interested in implementing in the future, and sometimes just because it wants to plant its flag and move on. There’s no guarantee that voice chat will be drastically improved for Switch 2, nor that it will be properly implemented in the first place, but that won’t stop us from getting excited about the prospect of proximity chat in Mario Kart 9, all the same.