VA's recognition drops right off with other sounds going, even with headphones!

[Assimilator1]

Hi
I'm having another problem with VA, possibly an ongoing one masked by early problems which were solved a while back. This one has taken a while to pin down, due to when it happens.

The problem I'm having now is that whilst playing Elite Dangerous VA's voice recognition dives right off when their are lots of sounds going on, originally I thought it was the mic picking up the sound from my speakers, so for some months now I've switch the sound to the headphones for ED. This (strangely) made no difference!

The most common time I get it is when I get hyperdicted, I try to always record them (just in case) by commanding 'record video', and somewhere around 1/2 the time this fails! :| When I check the log the confidence level has fallen below my chosen minimum of 68%. (I had to raise this because in the last voice pack update by HCS they introduced a stack of 1 word commands, which results in false activations!! And it's much harder to get rid of them now! (although I have mostly now). Nice one HCS! .

Anyway, generally that 68% CL isn't a problem as I usually get high 70's% & upwards.
But when theirs a lot of sound going on, like in hyperdictions or in battle, it drops & VA fails, and at the worst possible time! Here's an example :-

20:20:15 - Recognized : 'charge shields' (Confidence 97)
20:20:12 - Recognized : 'fire heatsink' (Confidence 87)
20:20:08 - Recognized : 'lights on' (Confidence 87)
20:20:04 - 'testing 1 2 3' recognized, but rejected with confidence level 65/68.
20:19:59 - 'testing 1 2 3' recognized, but rejected with confidence level 65/68.
20:19:52 - 'fire heatsink' recognized, but rejected with confidence level 67/68.
20:19:41 - 'fire heatsink' recognized, but rejected with confidence level 60/68.
20:19:36 - 'fire heatsink' recognized, but rejected with confidence level 63/68.

Usually when I issue my custom cmd of 'testing 1 2 3' it brings it back to life, but even that failed this time! Commanding 'lights on' did get it going as you can see. And you can see that 'fire heatsink' shot up from 60-67% to 87% CL! Why?
For hyperdictions I find that the quickest way to get it going again is to alt-tab the game, issue any command (where it's suddenly recognised at 90+%!), go back to the game & issue the cmd again & it works. This would probably work for battles too, but it's not exactly convenient! :p. I'm wondering now if purely alt tabbing would do it, I may have tried that, but I can't remember the outcome.

Oh btw, when I've retrained the speech engine for other reasons, it's made no difference to this problem.
Incidentally, doing that fixed a problem with recognising a particular couple of words, but then made VA sometimes struggle with other particular ones! (like 'engage supercruise).

Any idea what's going on here?
VA is becoming as much a liability as it is a saviour atm, & it's really doing my head in, again!
I'm hoping this can be resolved or I'm going to have to think about ditching it .

Regards
Mark

[Pfeil]

It's possible you have a line noise/crosstalk issue where sounds played through your soundcard are somehow getting picked up by the microphone input.

Does the bar at the bottom of VoiceAttack's main window move when sounds are playing?


If you have access to one, have you tried a USB microphone/headset, as mentioned in the "I'm not saying anything but VoiceAttack keeps hearing things" section of this topic? Those tend to work around this issue as they have their own integrated soundcard.

[Assimilator1]

Hi, thanks for your reply.
I guess I should've mentioned that I am using a USB headset (got as a fix for previous issues).
Other info that might be handy, running Win 7  SP1, i7 4930k @4.1 GHz, 16 GB RAM, mbrd Asus P9X79 Pro, AMD RX 580 8GB grx card.

Re VAs sound bar, I don't know, can't see it when I'm playing the game, & it'll be tricky to alt tab it when at the times it does play up. But I may have found a work around, see below.

I tried something last night with interesting results, I have a 2nd monitor, & suspecting the issue might be something to do with VA being a background program when ED is running, I moved VA to the other monitor after it played up straight after 1st trying to use it (failed to recognise 'engage supercruise' multiple times).
Straight after moving it to the 2nd monitor (which is not used by the game) it responded 1st time, & during a 13minute battle it behaved almost impeccably, just a couple of errors, which is better by miles than it has ever done! . That said, it's only the 1st test, so I will hold final judgement until I've done that at least a few times.

[Assimilator1]

I think moving it to the 2nd screen & it behaving itself back then was a fluke.
I've since been altering the mic levels (again), & leaving it on the 2nd screen so that I can see it easily, it's been better but is still much more likely to play up when various sounds are playing from the game.

Any further ideas anyone?

[Pfeil]

If you haven't already, you could try checking "Disable Adaptive Recognition (useful for noisy environments)" and "Disable Acoustic Echo Cancellation (could help with recognition)" on the "Recognition" tab of the VoiceAttack options window.
This is more of a general potential fix though.


To try and rule out crosstalk, you could also try recording the input from your microphone using something like Audacity, to see if you can hear the ingame sounds when playing back the recording.

[Assimilator1]

Those 2 are already ticked.

Good idea re audacity :thumbsup: