Voice Attack - Nahimic 2 driver software

[sniperdoc]

So, thank god for this post to point me in the right direction:
https://groups.google.com/g/voiceattack/c/VxNC27Bhw1E?pli=1

I previously was using a Sound Blaster X-Fi Recon 3d and Voice Attack was working just fine. However, the card was old (just like my system is getting old) and started having issues. So, I started using the onboard Nahimic 2 sound device of my MSI XPower Gaming Titanium 170A motherboard.

I hadn't played Elite Dangerous in a while, and thought I'd fire it up again. Well, I could not, for the life of me, get Voice Attack to recognize any sound input at all. Mind you, I'm an IT guy of over 20 years experience, and am well aware of the Sound Control panel and setting the default sound device, etc.

Restarting PC, testing various mic's that would work fine in Windows, Discord, GoTo, Skype, etc... but Voice Attack would NOT work at all. No matter what settings I chose. I changed speech engines, disabled and re-enabled speech recognition, reinstalled the entire Speech recognition subsystem via powershell... nada.

Then, in a last ditch effort I tried narrowing down my searches in Google and came upon that article.

THANK GOD...!!! Closing the Nahimic 2 driver software fixed the problem!!!

HOWEVER... my question is why this is still an issue...? It's 2021 and that article was from 2016...

[Gary]

It's still an ongoing issue since Nahimic is still producing a product that interferes with speech recognition in Windows when run with certain options enabled.

New installations of VA will come with, 'Disable Acoustic Echo Cancellation' checked by default.  This normally solves the problem by modifying a setting that is turned on by default in Windows.  There should also be a warning message if Nahimic is detected as running as a 'Nahimic'-labeled process (for instance, I see this log entry every time I start VA since my machine has Nahimic running).  There are also articles sprinkled here and there within this forum and within the Steam discussions regarding this, but having the setting enabled by default has solved this for most folks. 

In order for this to cause an issue in 2021, Nahimic (or some variant of Nahimic) needs to be running on your machine, certain options in Nahimic need to be set (not necessarily Nahimic's default options), Windows speech recognition needs to be running and does not have its acoustic echo cancellation disabled (this is enabled by default in Windows).

Good to see you've got it working!

[sniperdoc]

Thanks Gary. Was just curious. I looked through the various VoiceAttack manuals and didn't see anything in the troubleshooting section about this. Maybe have someone put in a blurb about some Audio drivers conflicting with Windows Speech Recognition and disabling the application temporarily to test. Otherwise I'd have been fishing in the dark, considering EVERYTHING else was working just fine, just not VoiceAttack. xD

Thanks again for the rapid response. Have a great 2021.

[Pfeil]

Was there no warning message in the log on the main window? Normally if Nahimic is detected (which uses specific process names), there is a message telling you that it can cause issues, as Gary mentioned.