How to work with voice command software

[AndyHill]

I have some experience with voice command software such as VAC system (http://www.dwvac.com/) and so far I'm impressed with the usefulness. They are mostly used for radio communications and since there are certain not very demanding design principles that will make the radio menu more usable I thought I'd share them.

 

Basically VAC system taps into the integrated Windows voice recognition library, listens to specific commands and then sends the key combination bound to the command - much like a programmable joystick. Ideally this can be done by reading the texts from the screen and use the menu level by level just like with normal menu controls. The other approach is to listen to strings of command such as "wingman attack tanks" and then send the entire key sequence at a time. This is faster, but requires the user to memorize all the possible voice commands.

 

1) To help voice commands not interfere with for example Teamspeak or pickup random coughs as orders, it usually uses an activation key. It is helpful if this can be the same one as the radio menu activation key and works also as a press and hold key. This is usually not a difficult requirement and works well in for example Il-2 1946.

 

2) It is important that common commands such as "return to formation" have the same key binding attached to them in every menu they appear - like for example in the "wingman" and "flight" sections. This is quite critical, since otherwise it will be hard to work with voice commands at all, since the system isn't context-sensitive. Unless, of course...

 

3) ..the voice system is integrated into the game itself. It shouldn't be very much work (probably involving fairly good libraries that take care of all the heavy lifting, I haven't checked it out myself, though) especially compared to the amount of work otherwise related to flight simulator development. Of course it can be a bit much to ask when every little bit is too much. But maybe at some point in the future?

 

The biggest thing about voice commands is that with a good HOTAS or other home cockpit hardware they basically release you from the necessity to use the keyboard. I've been impressed with the reliability and found VAC System to be a pretty useful tool for simming. Not so much for RoF, since there's relatively little communication there, but in BoS the situation might be different. 

[Bearcat]

I agree. I used to use VAC myself. I reacquired my key from Ron but still have not set up a new profile. I lost the old one in a HD crash but it was pretty nice. I had my TS comms tied to R CTRL and my VAC comms tied to R ALT. I had several vocal phrases tied to certain commamds.. it added to the immersion for me. For instance "Anyone help" "Somebody help" "Clear my 6" "Get him off me" and "Bandit on my 6" were all tied to TAB 7 I think it was..

[Allons]

Sounds interesting, THX, will try it & report back

[=LD=Hethwill]

Will try this. Thank you for the heads up.

[SvAF/F16_Goblin]

Only drawback is that in the Swedish W7 64 MS has turned off voice control

so I can't use my VAC license anymore

[AndyHill]

Why would the Swedish Windows turn off voice commands? I have a Finnish one (although I use English as the language), so I'm slightly worried if there are trouble with non-English operating systems... At least as far as I know the voice recognition in Windows only knows English, but I can imagine support for native languages might screw things up a bit at some point.