Today I learned that I’d probably be a terrible wizard in the Harry Potter world. As appealing as flying brooms and getting wasted on butterbeer sounds, I’d unfortunately fail step one: say the spell correctly. I’ve been trying out a new Hogwarts Legacy mod that lets you cast spells with your voice, and it’s a real stickler for pronunciation.
Just like Hermoinie in that one part from Harry Potter that is stuck in my brain forever because it’d play over and over again on ABC Family, the VoiceSpells mod for Hogwarts Legacy is keen to remind me that “it’s Leviosa, not Leviosaaaaaa”. As I sat at my PC desperately yelling “Confringo” into a mic while goblins impaled me with axes, I felt for Ron.
At first I instinctually blamed the mod (which works by hooking into Windows’ existing voice recognition systems) for every unrecognized command, but it worked consistently enough on other spells that I think I was having my own “Leviosa” moment. I know that I tend to mumble through my words, but it was tough to listen back to myself and accept that what I was saying sounded more like “Cnfrengo” or “Kafrego” depending how lazily I belted it out. When I’d slow down, take a beat, and produce the entire word, it’d actually work darn well. I even got the killing curse Avarda Kedavra to work on my second try.
Watch my mediocre spellcasting skills below (and if you’re having trouble viewing the video, here’s another way to watch it).
There’s enough of a delay that you probably don’t want to use it for combat, but I can definitely see leaning on this for everyday Hogwarts puzzle solving. The voice commands coexist with your normal controls, so you can still manually cast spells too. Since the mod is really just a little app that listens for specific words to press keys, you don’t have to mess with your Hogwarts Legacy directory, either.
One weird thing though: the mod was flagged by Nexus Mods’ antivirus scans and remains unavailable to download directly from the site. As Nexus notes, this doesn’t automatically mean the mod contains a virus, but it does mean Nexus can’t guarantee it’s safe. I downloaded the mod through a third-party site that the modder links to on the page and, while I also can’t guarantee it’s safe, I can tell you it works and hasn’t been flagged as malicious by Windows or done any noticeable damage to my PC (yet). So download at your own risk!