Voice Attack and HCS Voice Pack (ASTRA)

[KRRONOSS]

Hi CMDR's

On the weekend I bought VA and one of the HCS Voice packs (the ASTRA one - as much as I like him, I couldn't bear listening to William Shatner for hours!)

Anyway, they are pretty awesome BUT I am having some issues with a few commands. As i use a HOTAS it appears that VA gets confused if you manually launch a command (e.g. you have linked the left panel open button to your HOTAS and open it this way then try and ask ASTRA to open it at a later point, she gets confused, repeats the command but nothing happens). I've worked this out and now try to just always verbalise commands but the real issue is this, when i say the "request docking" command sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. Often it jumps around between navigation, transactions and contacts in the left panel and doesn't actually request docking properly. Sometimes it does work though and I can't work out what the issue is. I tried turning off keyboard shortcuts and this worked at the time but when i logged in next time, it wasn't working again. I really can't work out why it does work sometimes and other times it doesn't.

Does anyone else have this issue and can anyone help me work out what might be occurring/going wrong? I don't know how to set VA up to execute complex commands like this (a tutorial would be great if anyone could point me to one, i've looked and can't find one although there are a few simpler ones out there) or I would try making my own.

The HCS forums dont seem to be much help at all as I never get responses...

[Loriath]

I have Astra and Verity. I have edited the VA Profile and disabled all the keyboard actions, so if I press a key on the keyboard myself Verity does not respond.

The panel commands can be a pain as you have to remember to reset the position to the Nav Panel on the left and Status on the right. If she gets confused, I tell her to "Reset Panels" after I have set them back to normal.

As far as VA not responding, that is a Windows issue. You have to go through the Voice Training 2-3 times to get it to be decently reliable. Also, make sure the Speech Training and the Voice training is set to the style of English you use. US or UK makes a difference. I have to use US due to my Canadian pronunciations. If you are in the UK, then make sure it is set as such, etc. And if you have an accent, that will make it more difficult for it to understand unless you have done more training.

Open the VA software alone, and maybe with notepad open and issue commands. See what VA is reporting as to what you said, and its response. You will find that certain commands that you try will not work. That is why there are several voice commands for each command. I use the same ones over and over. I always said "Request Docking" and Verity never worked, because it was expecting "Docking Request", so I changed the command to reflect what I was using.

Also, if you really want to customise it, don't customise the Verity/Astra VA profile. Instead, create another custom file, and in the settings for the Verity/Astra profile, you can tell it to include another VA profile. I tell it to also include my custom one. My Radio controller, ED Toolbox, Special commands, and Comms Dictation commands exist.

TL/DR;

1) Do the speech training 3-4 times
2) Practice giving commands with just VA or VA and Notepad open to see how it is responding
3) Don't customise the HCS Voicepack file to much, instead use a second VA Profile for Custom Commands.
4) Understand that it is not perfect, and you will end up like the rest of us, bitching at VA a few times a night for sure.

[Schmobius]

Hope this isn't too off-topic, but it is at least related. When you have Astra request docking, does she actually open the left panel, go to contacts, select the station, move to request docking, and OK it, or does it magically happen?

Wondering if there's a way to make it magically happen via a non-voice attack macro, but if she's going through all the panels anyway, that wouldn't help.

[Cmdr Kharma]

I have a macro set for docking non VA.....

It does go through all the panels...But You can turn that off within ED if wanted.....

Oh and it's fast....

As with any macro you just have to make sure your starting position is correct.....

[TorTorden]

Yeah. If we just had the opportunity to disable wrapping when cycling tabs you could insert 4-5 quick "left panel" button pushes to make it anchor itself.

I think it should be a different button than normal cause wrapping is quite handy.

But ideally the game should just have a state aware API that would keep track of all the little toggles etc and VA or whatever could use these and never loose track.

[Cmdr Kharma]

Or just make the tab assignable......

Then that would be the first command in the macro.....

No matter where you were you could start there.....