VA issues after contact with ATC in MSFS

[tjvenhaus]

I'm using a simple profile to read checklists and provide a few voice commands in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

It works well, reading checklist items from a text file (e.g., "Battery on") and waiting me to respond ("check") before moving on to the next item on the checklist.

I've programmed a few keystroke commands as well ("Gear down"), with response from VA ("Roger, gear down").

All good, until I get any voices from the in-game tower, ground, or ATIS.

So, if I request taxi for example, and the MSFS text-to-speech responds with "taxi and hold short runway two one", then after that I only hear the very tail end of checklist items from VA, or in some cases nothing at all ("Battery on" becomes "...on").

If I say "repeat," sometimes I'll get the full checklist item read back, but usually just the last tail end.

I ran a flight this morning with text-to-speech turned off in MSFS, and all checklist reads from VA were fine.

So, any text from MSFS seems to hose the checklist sequence. I tried both Azure and off-line options in MSFS. Some sort of conflict?  Thanks for any help!

[Pfeil]

(I edited your post to add line breaks)


Is the MSFS test-to-speech actively playing when the issue occurs, I.E. they're playing simultaneously?

Or does the issue occur if a "Say Something with Text-To-Speech" action is executed at any point after the game played back its TTS?
If the latter, how is normal behavior restored? Restarting the game? Restarting VoiceAttack? Restarting your computer?


Does enabling the "Single TTS Instance" option on the "System / Advanced" tab of the VoiceAttack options window make any difference?


Click the wrench icon on VoiceAttack's main window, and on the "General" tab of the VoiceAttack options window click "System info >", choose "Generate Settings Summary", then "Write to File"; Save the file and upload it here.

[tjvenhaus]

Is the MSFS text-to-speech actively playing when the issue occurs, I.E. they're playing simultaneously?

Or does the issue occur if a "Say Something with Text-To-Speech" action is executed at any point after the game played back its TTS?
If the latter, how is normal behavior restored? Restarting the game? Restarting VoiceAttack? Restarting your computer?

It doesn't seem to matter if MSFS and VA talk over each other or not. VA starts out fine, but once I fire up radios and contact ground or the tower and get directions, I get the truncated speech from VA.  Restarting VA didn't seem to help.  A restart of the sim is needed.

Does enabling the "Single TTS Instance" option on the "System / Advanced" tab of the VoiceAttack options window make any difference?

I'll give this a go this afternoon.

Click the wrench icon on VoiceAttack's main window, and on the "General" tab of the VoiceAttack options window click "System info >", choose "Generate Settings Summary", then "Write to File"; Save the file and upload it here.

Uploaded.  Thanks for the quick response.

[tjvenhaus]

No luck on selecting Single TTS Instance.  Same behavior.  VA reads from the checklist just fine until the first instance of TTS from the Microsoft Flight Simulator (request taxi).  After that, I would only hear a very small snippet of the last word from the next item on the checklist, sometimes nothing at all.

Now, if I say "repeat", VA gives me the line from the checklist in a different voice (Microsoft Zira, I think) from the default I had selected (Hazel, maybe?) that does seem to do better. Like a frustrated flight attendant in the back fed up with me saying "repeat". 

[Pfeil]

If the text-to-speech engine in use switches to "Zira" by itself, that could indicate the chosen engine isn't responding.

Does setting a difference text-to-speech engine as the default for the profile (using the "Default Text-to-speech voice" dropdown in the profile options; assuming you don't have a non-default engine configured for your individual actions) make a difference?


The "Single TTS Instance" option pertains to VoiceAttack itself. If the engine has in issue with multiple instances running simultaneously, that scenario could still occur if both VoiceAttack and MSFS are using it.

[tjvenhaus]

You read my mind. Going to give this a try next.  We'll see how "David" does.

[tjvenhaus]

Seeing the same behavior regardless of voice selected in VA (and setting the same voice as default in Windows).  Starting to see the same issue pop up even before any Flight Sim TTS now, so at a bit of a loss.  Some Random, truncated speech from VA during setup to a flight and very broken speech after TTS from MSFS.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Tom

[Pfeil]

If you change the "Audio Output Type" option on the "Audio" tab of the VoiceAttack options window to "Legacy Audio", does that make a difference?

[tjvenhaus]

Switching Audio Output type on the Audio tab to Legacy Audio did the trick.  All VA TTS from my checklists work perfectly now, even after several communications with ATC (had them talking over each other at one point).  Had all other addons and programs running (SimHaptic, FSR, etc.) during the tests.

Thank you so much for the help and very short response times!  Very much appreciate it.