VA often randomly stops working after a while - part 2 - mostly fixed!

[Assimilator1]

In reference to this thread http://voiceattack.com/SMF/index.php?topic=647.0 - which I posted over a year ago (which was in itself a repost from a lost thread much earlier).
I would've just updated the last thread, but someone around here is fastidious about locking old threads!

Anyway, shortly after that thread I bought a new jack plug headset (not cheap rubbish), plugged directly onto the back of the motherboard, re-learnt the speech engine & tried using it again..... & it made no difference!
Until recently I gave up with the problem & I had to just keep restarting VA, which along with it going deaf more quickly (it seemed) slowly drove me nuts! Couldn't live with it, couldn't live without it!

Then I recalled what Gary said about USB headphones here http://voiceattack.com/SMF/index.php?topic=1635.0 , so after a bit of Googling, which basically said that USB headsets might only be better if you have a rubbish soundcard/onboard sound, I decided to take a punt & buy a PC 960 Logitech USB headset (£25).

And wow what a difference! The grey voice volume bar in VA was shooting up to the top even though the mic vol was lower, the mic was sometimes accurately hearing what my telly was saying across the room! lol (before I dropped the mic vol), & VA has never since stopped responding since . Oh & also it often recognises non-command words correctly too, which was new to me!

For my jack plug headset (also Logitech btw) I had to have +20db & 80% vol for VA to work at all, any lower & it just wouldn't hear me, any higher & it very quickly ground to a halt. At the working setting, the grey bar in VA would only move 1-2cm (I wish someone had told me how much it ought to move! :p ), & it rarely recognised non-command words accurately.

So, it turns out that the voice quality via my onboard sound was rubbish (even though no one had said it was, they'd only ever said it was quiet), & bearing in mind I don't have a cheap m/brd, although fairly old now, my Asus P9 X79 Pro was damn near top end in its time!

I had occasional early problems with my USB set of un-commanded actions (I think caused by the overly high mic vol), 1 of which caused my ship to launch when I wasn't ready!
The only issue I have now (AFAIK), is that I need the mic vol at 40%, but everytime I run VA it sets it to 100%! (which is the setting the windows speech recog engine set), is there someway to stop this?

Btw Gary, thanks for putting up with all my previous questions etc regarding this! You can rest easier now .
Something that occurred to me, is that if their is some sort of 3rd party app that can check voice level & quality, that would have saved us a load of time! I don't know if such an app exists though. Or alternately, would recording a short video using OBS with ED+VA be a good way to assess voice quality??

[Assimilator1]

Hello? I have a couple of outstanding questions in the last 2 paragraphs.

[Pfeil]

For the microphone volume issue(if that's what you're referring to), iceblast made a suggestion that should work in your original topic:

The other thing you can do is, when your setting up the mic in windows, it will have you speak some words, as you do that, it will adjust the volume on the mic. When it gets to what you think it should be 40-50% finish the program without saying anything. So the mic doesn't go up anymore. After that, your problem should be solved.

The same thing happened to me, so I ran the setup for the mic, and did whatever I could to fool it to set the mic volume at what really worked for me, and not what it thought worked. After that, I was good to go.

VoiceAttack doesn't modify your microphone volume, but the speech engine does, so you need to either have VoiceAttack explicitly reset the volume level after the speech engine modifies it, or attempt to "fool" the speech engine into using a lower level.

[Assimilator1]

Yes the mic volume was 1 of my outstanding questions, thanks for replying . I thought windows might be the culprit, I noticed it was changed by the voice engine.

When it gets to what you think it should be 40-50%.....
That sentence doesn't make sense, do you know what he meant?

How can I get VA to reset the mic volume? I couldn't see any options for that in VA.

On my other question, I tried out OBS to see how my voice sound, I can clearly hear it now! . So I think it is a good tool to asses your own mic volume, if you have no one else to check it for you.

[Pfeil]

When it gets to what you think it should be 40-50%.....
That sentence doesn't make sense, do you know what he meant?

I believe he's suggesting you speak as loud as required to get the volume to automatically adjust itself down to the percentage you require.

If you speak softly, the speech engine should compensate by turning the volume up, if you speak loudly(or yell, depending on how quiet your microphone output it) it should turn the volume down.

Microphone setup refers to the "Set up microphone" option in the "Speech Recognition" section of the Windows control panel(this is what the items are labeled in Windows 7 at least, however Windows 10 should have equivalents).


In Windows 7 at least, this is nowhere near an exact science, as the only indication you'll get that the volume adjusts itself if the bar staying within the green area while you speak, there's no numeric readout.

EDIT: Aha! There is a simple way to see the volume the speech engine will use:

Open "Recording Devices"(you can right-click the speaker icon in the system tray and it should have that in the context menu), click your microphone and click the "Properties" button(or right-click it and click "Properties" in the context menu), click the "Levels" tab, and you should see a volume slider for the microphone volume.

When you go through the microphone setup, if you yell into the microphone, you'll see the volume go down. It does not appear to ever go back up(it always begins with 100% when you run the setup).

By observing this slider you should be able to "tune" the volume to your requirements.


I did try moving the slider to manually set the volume during setup, but that doesn't work, unfortunately.

How can I get VA to reset the mic volume? I couldn't see any options for that in VA.

It's an action found under Other > Windows > Set Audio Level.

You can set up a command that contains it which would run when your profile loads.

[Assimilator1]

Ah, excellent! Thanks

But now I've got a new problem lol, weird 1 this, a lot of random sounds or mutterings by me are being recognised as lights on or lights off! With confidence levels often over 80%, not only that, but when I do say lights off/on, it doesn't recognise those! This is doing my head in! Any ideas?
Aside from the mic volume issue, I thought VA was sorted now with my USB mic, but apparently not

[edit]Btw I've been using that mic slider to dial down the volume already, but good idea about watching it next time I do the voice training . Incidentally, I've dialled it down to 5% now! Let's see if that stops the above problem too....

[Gangrel]

Your confidence level is also a factor, the lower it is, the less likely that VA will match random sounds with commands