Experiment success: Dictating text messages with my voice in Elite: Dangerous

[Shigawire]

For the ultimate VR experience, I decided to go one further beyond using Oculus Rift DK2 + Voice Attack, by also adding Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS) to the mix. The reason is that I wanted to be able to play Elite Dangerous without ever touching the keyboard, and leaving my hands on the HOTAS.

Experiment was a success! But it can be wonky.. for example, my voice commands to enable the "Quick comms" and "Communication panel" didn't work with Voice Attack.. all the time. Sometimes because DNS takes precedence over Voice Attack, so I need to disable DNS by saying "stop listening," so only Voice Attack reads my messages. So the only thing that worked for me was to say "Press four" and "press five", which are the hotkeys I've chosen for the comms panel. Thus leveraging DNS, and not voice attack.

I can now communicate with friends and strangers on my quick comms window without ever touching the keyboard.

Example:

(looks up at quick comms and communication panel)
"Press 5" (comms panel)
(uses HOTAS to select a friend, and selects text chat)
"Hello comma I'm now speaking to you without using the keyboard period press enter"

text shows up immediately:
"Hello, I'm now speaking to you without using the keyboard."


DNS is far superior to any other voice recognition software I've ever tried. Though it doesn't do a good job of setting up macros, so that's why I still use Voice Attack. If they had made DNS to support setting up macros properly, I would use exclusively DNS. I recommend training DNS with at least 20-25 minutes worth of your voice.

Imho this is a MUST for Elite Dangerous VR.

 

[Frank]

Does DNS effect the performance of your computer? Do you notice any sort of framerate drop?

I was thinking of setting up some stock phrases with DNS, ones I tend to want to say a lot; "Hey there! Great Game!", "Why are you arming hardpoints?", "Good shot! you've almost killed me", "Please leave me alone", "HELP!"

 

[Rhaedas]

I had tried early on to do the same thing using Windows Dictation, since it's already on my machine. But I couldn't get it to play nice with VA through a hot key trigger like that, so I dropped the idea. I'm not using VR, but it would still be great to be able to say "Open Channel", then just say what I want to send, and "Send message", all while I'm doing things like flying around.

 

[rootsrat]

I was thinking of using something like this alongside VA. With FreeTrackNoIR its hard to type on keyboard and look up to check the text on screen with the camera moving all over the place, as you look down and up all the time - so I wanted so text to speech software in addition to VA, but never looked into this properly

What is the performance hit of DNS?

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Sounds great, and something I would like too, but £80?

too rich for my blood so I am out.

good work however!.

has anyone had much luck using the built in win7 voice recognition?

also, is the built in voice recognition in win8 or possibly more likely windows 10 any better?

(I am itching for a reason to install win 8.1 / win10 preview

 

[Shigawire]

I was thinking of using something like this alongside VA. With FreeTrackNoIR its hard to type on keyboard and look up to check the text on screen with the camera moving all over the place, as you look down and up all the time - so I wanted so text to speech software in addition to VA, but never looked into this properly

What is the performance hit of DNS?

Performance hit is zero for me.

 

[rootsrat]

Sounds great, and something I would like too, but £80?
/snip

Is it how much it costs? That's well overpriced piece of software, provided the only use I plan for it is voice typing comms in Elite

Performance hit is zero for me.

Thanks for confirming. In the spite of the above message though I think I'll pass and try some free/cheaper alternatives

 

[Shigawire]

Sounds great, and something I would like too, but £80?

too rich for my blood so I am out.

good work however!.

It is expensive, I agree. Also, I would prefer it if they developed a gamer-oriented version with proper macro support.

has anyone had much luck using the built in win7 voice recognition?

also, is the built in voice recogniction in win8 or possibly more likely windows 10 and better?

(I am itching for a reason to install win 8.1 / win10 preview

I doubt it's better than DNS.

 

[Dai]

ok I like the idea of using the text with voice attack, can you explain how you combine the voice recognition software with voice attack? I have to admit I have not tried it (just read your post) but if you could put a bit of a how to together I can try this when I get home tonight.

 

[Shigawire]

ok I like the idea of using the text with voice attack, can you explain how you combine the voice recognition software with voice attack? I have to admit I have not tried it (just read your post) but if you could put a bit of a how to together I can try this when I get home tonight.

Dai, what do you mean exactly?

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

It is expensive, I agree. Also, I would prefer it if they developed a gamer-oriented version with proper macro support.



I doubt it's better than DNS.

sure, me too.... but its free!.

i meant better than win 7 speech recognition, not better than DNS

 

[Dai]

Well, I have voice attack already, will look at getting someother voice recognition software like dragon.

But how have you configured the setup to work?

are there any specific settings required or does it just install and work?

 

[Ben Ryder]

For the ultimate VR experience, I decided to go one further beyond using Oculus Rift DK2 + Voice Attack, by also adding Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS) to the mix. The reason is that I wanted to be able to play Elite Dangerous without ever touching the keyboard, and leaving my hands on the HOTAS.

Experiment was a success! But it can be wonky.. for example, my voice commands to enable the "Quick comms" and "Communication panel" didn't work with Voice Attack.. all the time. Sometimes because DNS takes precedence over Voice Attack, so I need to disable DNS by saying "stop listening," so only Voice Attack reads my messages. So the only thing that worked for me was to say "Press four" and "press five", which are the hotkeys I've chosen for the comms panel. Thus leveraging DNS, and not voice attack.

I can now communicate with friends and strangers on my quick comms window without ever touching the keyboard.

Example:

(looks up at quick comms and communication panel)
"Press 5" (comms panel)
(uses HOTAS to select a friend, and selects text chat)
"Hello comma I'm now speaking to you without using the keyboard period press enter"

text shows up immediately:
"Hello, I'm now speaking to you without using the keyboard."


DNS is far superior to any other voice recognition software I've ever tried. Though it doesn't do a good job of setting up macros, so that's why I still use Voice Attack. If they had made DNS to support setting up macros properly, I would use exclusively DNS. I recommend training DNS with at least 20-25 minutes worth of your voice.

Imho this is a MUST for Elite Dangerous VR.

Any chance of a guide? Order to set things up? Tricky bits?

 

[Rhaedas]

I'm pretty sure all he's doing is having certain hot keys not only access the comms panel, but trigger VA to stop listening and DNS to start dictating, and visa versa. It's what I was trying to get Win7's dictation to do, but it's a pain in the...well. It won't work right. Microsoft seems to think that if you're using their product, it should be on all the time.

 

[Shigawire]

Ok, I decided to jump ship completely. Due to the flimsy accuracy of Voice Attack, and the very impressive accuracy of DNS, I have set up all my VA commands for DNS now. Using exclusively DNS. Only problem is.. I had to get the most expensive version of DNS to be able to make macros.

Any chance of a guide? Order to set things up? Tricky bits?

I should be able to do that, sure.

 

[Dizzy B High]

Ok, I decided to jump ship completely. Due to the flimsy accuracy of Voice Attack, and the very impressive accuracy of DNS, I have set up all my VA commands for DNS now. Using exclusively DNS. Only problem is.. I had to get the most expensive version of DNS to be able to make macros.

Does DNS Support conditions like voice attack?

If not thats a deal breaker for me

 

[Rhaedas]

Just noticed yesterday Gary addressed this again.

Voice Attack forums

I'd be very interested to see what he comes up with.

 

[Shigawire]

Does DNS Support conditions like voice attack?

If not thats a deal breaker for me

Well, only the expensive version of DNS supports proper macro commands.. but the ones I've seen are quite complex. You can even set up proper scripting in it. Any particular conditions you want to know about?

 

[Dizzy B High]

Well, only the expensive version of DNS supports proper macro commands.. but the ones I've seen are quite complex. You can even set up proper scripting in it. Any particular conditions you want to know about?

Mainly for tracking the state of things.

For example if the landing is down/up
weapons deployed/retracted

and more advanced stuff like checking what tab i'm on on either the left or right panels.

Personally i think DNS macro functions really are over kill for ED where VA does a much simpler job of executing basic commands, and it allows syncing of commands to the keyboard too, so for example i can put the landing gear by voice or the keyboard shortcut, and voice attack still keeps track of whether the landing gear is up or down.

I agree with you on the fact that DNS's voice recognition is far superior to Voice attacks, this is my only fault with Voice attack, i have quite a thick cockney accent, so voice attack struggles to understand what i am saying, and i have to repeat commands a lot, after the third attempt, i just think SOD it and use the keyboard short-cut.

Where as DNS understands what i say perfectly, it really is a fantastic piece of software.

It would be great if DNS's voice recognition could be somehow be used within Voice attack.

I do have the standard edition of DNS, i think its a lot to upgrade to the pro version just to do something i can do with VA that costs only £8.

If you could post some kind of sample of how you use DNS to press keys and the like i would be very interested to see how its done.

You can have a look at my voice attack profiles by following the links in my sig, so you have some kind of idea of what i would like to achieve.

 

[Dizzy B High]

the most helpful thing at the moment would be if you could tell me how to run a dictaion command from voice attack.

I.e Open dragon dictation, dictate message, close dragon.