Speech-to-Text

[shadragon]

Good Day,

I'm using Voice Attack in VR for Elite Dangerous. I can do almost everything in the game through HOTAS and VA, but comms with other players is difficult without being able to see the keyboard.

Is any work being done on a speech-to-text function where I can activate comms to another player and simply speak my message? Or are there available macros I can modify to send pre-generated text to someone?

This is the only weakness in an otherwise powerful system.

Cheers.

[Tenebrous]

I'm sure I've seen people have success with the dictation part of VA for this.

Perhaps this is along the right lines: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=145653

[shadragon]

Yes, I saw that posting last night.

Requires the Beta though and they are typically a little more unstable than release software. Do we have anything that will work with the latest release version?

[Tenebrous]

Well, that post was made 17/05/2015 - and I think the whole dictation thing is in the non-beta version now

[shadragon]

Doh. Missed that. Will check when I get home tonight.

Cheers.

[Rhaedas]

Just a comment on my experiences. I tried to get dictation to work, and got some VA routines themselves that seemed to work okay. But the weak link is Windows recognition, it just isn't that great. The way VA uses it and weighs the probability of matches works fine, but actually figuring out what you've said for unknown words, nope. If you turn off the filter in VA so that it shows unmatched commands, you'll see a demonstration of just how bad it is. I had really hoped that Windows 10 would bring an upgrade, but I don't think they did much.

Now, one way to get around this for what you're talking about is not to use dictation, but to build a library of typical phrases you might say to other players. Make those as commands with wildcards etc, and let VA gloss over Windows weakness. Once you get a match, the actual inputting of the text into the comms screen is pretty simple. I had done it one letter at a time when I tried it, but since then there's been ways developed to pull from a text file and dump it (I think).

[shadragon]

Thanks Rhaedas. My experience show the same thing. There is no easy way to do it and pre-done phrases, while good, don't cover 100% of all situations.

Let's hope we get a virtual keyboard or the like soon.

Cheers.