Arma 3 and VAC (Voice Activated Commands) responsiveness

[Mitor 10]

Hello,

I have started playing Arma 3 with Voice Activated Commands and created a personal profile that contains more than 500 voice commands in VAC. Testing it in the editor it worked almost perfectly, responding pretty well to al commands I gave to my soldiers.

I selected (As it seemed to work well) in al commands the following times

Duration: 25 ms

Pause: 20 ms

Repeat: 1

But yesterday playing the mission Scape From Stratis with a friend and 6 AI soldiers the VAC-ARMA 3 commands responsiveness was awful. Sometimes they worked, sometimes the command got stuck in one of the menus and did nothing at all.

Something I noted was some of the commands just didn't press all the keys, for example:

For the command Team green go prone which is supposed to to click 9 9 2 7 8 it sometimes pressed 9 9 2 8 only or 9 2 and stuck in that menu. (Also happened with SHIFT+ F1 which is how I have set the team red commands.)

Some others were simply misunderstood by the program (VAC). Note than this didn't happen in the editor, in which I was playing alone and with more performance.

So...

Do you think this is due to the less performance I have in multiplayer?

Increasing the pause/duration of all the commands in the VAC builder could solve the problem? If so, Can I do it so that I can change all of the commands value? Doing it one by one is going to be terrible for me...

Thank you.

Could this be solved increasing some of the

Edited July 29, 2013 by Mitor

[Alpha-Kilo 36]

Mitor,

I have been using VAC for some time now and I can confirm your issues. If this happens, i usually repeat the order a few times or use keystrokes. Of course this is not a good solution. However, I cannot sinmply say that it happens in missions, but not in the editor. I can only say, the responsiveness is unpredictable.

Although it is quite obvious I'd like to point out that the game itself - or the AI to be precise - sometimes doesn't execute all commands as expected. Order a group of AI under fire to board a vehicle and observe the "ballet" they are performing. In these cases it's the game and VAC is not to blame. If you are not sure issue your order by keystrokes to verify if VAC is to blame.

I often see another weird thing which I call "false positives": I have VAC listen to voice input and open the builder to see what the program is doing. Very often, the humming of the PC fan or maybe my breathing and other relatively quiet sounds are registered and interpreted as commands. Ingame these false positives lead to unexpected situations when menues pop open and other things happen though I didn't give any order. Does anybody know how to make VAC LESS responsive?

[ratszo 17]

.....

I often see another weird thing which I call "false positives": I have VAC listen to voice input and open the builder to see what the program is doing. Very often, the humming of the PC fan or maybe my breathing and other relatively quiet sounds are registered and interpreted as commands. Ingame these false positives lead to unexpected situations when menues pop open and other things happen though I didn't give any order. Does anybody know how to make VAC LESS responsive?

I'm using GlovePIE. Assigned a mouse button for push-to-talk -- "Microphone.Enabled = Mouse.Button4".

[Mitor 10]

Mitor,

I have been using VAC for some time now and I can confirm your issues. If this happens, i usually repeat the order a few times or use keystrokes. Of course this is not a good solution. However, I cannot sinmply say that it happens in missions, but not in the editor. I can only say, the responsiveness is unpredictable.

Although it is quite obvious I'd like to point out that the game itself - or the AI to be precise - sometimes doesn't execute all commands as expected. Order a group of AI under fire to board a vehicle and observe the "ballet" they are performing. In these cases it's the game and VAC is not to blame. If you are not sure issue your order by keystrokes to verify if VAC is to blame.

I often see another weird thing which I call "false positives": I have VAC listen to voice input and open the builder to see what the program is doing. Very often, the humming of the PC fan or maybe my breathing and other relatively quiet sounds are registered and interpreted as commands. Ingame these false positives lead to unexpected situations when menues pop open and other things happen though I didn't give any order. Does anybody know how to make VAC LESS responsive?

Indeed, my own breathing also triggered some commands when I played alone, and I partially fixed it not assigning one word commands. In my current VAC configuration, I use orders (For example Hold Fire) when I want to order something to all of my soldiers. This meant I had orders like Stealth or fire, which were the ones that were usually triggered with my own breathing or movement. So try to substitute these with more long orders like behave silently or fire your weapons. This will improve the recognition of commands and reduce that Noise Activated Commands, but the best solution is what I say bellow.

Because the main problem came up when I had to speak with a friend and give orders at the same time. All I had to say was Hello, how are you to my friend and my soldiers were already dancing. So I do what the above user says, but you don't need a third party program to do that. In VACBuilder, load your profile and click in the tab Profile attributes.

Then you have some options bellow the Category Assignments. You can select any key or combination of keys to activate voice commands (Select Arm) This will allow you to only give orders pressing a key, and there will be less mistakes.

[Alpha-Kilo 36]

Thanks for the comments Ratszo and Mitor.

I once tried GlovePie because I know it it is very popular application. Unfortunately I couldn't get it go work and I didn't understand how to program the commands. But I guess I will have to give it another try. I think I read that GlovePie has a kind of listening threshold which can be configured to avoid false positives or noise activated commands as you so aptly put it.

I don't really want to activate VAC by a keystroke because it is quicker to just talk. I use a push-to-deactivate VAC key, though, which is the same as my Teamspeak push-to-talk. This way I can at least avoid issuing commands to VAC when I talk to anpother human player.

[Mitor 10]

And about what I asked, any Ideas?

Hello,

I have started playing Arma 3 with Voice Activated Commands and created a personal profile that contains more than 500 voice commands in VAC. Testing it in the editor it worked almost perfectly, responding pretty well to al commands I gave to my soldiers.

I selected (As it seemed to work well) in al commands the following times

Duration: 25 ms

Pause: 20 ms

Repeat: 1

But yesterday playing the mission Scape From Stratis with a friend and 6 AI soldiers the VAC-ARMA 3 commands responsiveness was awful. Sometimes they worked, sometimes the command got stuck in one of the menus and did nothing at all.

Something I noted was some of the commands just didn't press all the keys, for example:

For the command Team green go prone which is supposed to to click 9 9 2 7 8 it sometimes pressed 9 9 2 8 only or 9 2 and stuck in that menu. (Also happened with SHIFT+ F1 which is how I have set the team red commands.)

Some others were simply misunderstood by the program (VAC). Note than this didn't happen in the editor, in which I was playing alone and with more performance.

So...

Do you think this is due to the less performance I have in multiplayer?

Increasing the pause/duration of all the commands in the VAC builder could solve the problem? If so, Can I do it so that I can change all of the commands value? Doing it one by one is going to be terrible for me...

Thank you.

Could this be solved increasing some of the

[ratszo 17]

And about what I asked, any Ideas?

Did you see this thread?:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?96773-ARMA-2-and-VAC-(Voice-Activated-Commands)&highlight=Voice+Activated+Commands+vac

and,

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?150814-Voice-Activation-for-Arma-3-via-VAC-Builder-Profile-and-other-software&highlight=voice

Also, if anyone wants a profile for GlovePie, pm me.

Edited July 30, 2013 by Ratszo

[ratszo 17]

And about what I asked, any Ideas?

Duration: 25 ms

Pause: 20 ms

Repeat: 1

Try 600ms.

600ms is 6/10th of a second.

Put some zeros behind your ms., 25ms. is 25/1000th of a second --do you see a problem?

Edited July 30, 2013 by Ratszo

[Mitor 10]

Try 600ms.

600ms is 6/10th of a second.

Put some zeros behind your ms., 25ms. is 25/1000th of a second --do you see a problem?

Yeah, 600 ms seems too much, Arma 3 should recognize faster keystrokes. Consider there are commands that need 4 keystrokes, that would mean more than two seconds to execute the command. Anyway thanks for the tip:

I will try with values a bit higher first, and I will start rising them till they work perfectly, as I have discovered you can set all pause and duration values to a desired value by selecting any of the commands and then right clicking the text duration / pause and then you can assign all values of the profile to the one chosen. This significantly eases the testing.

[Tyl3r99 41]

arma 3 should have an inbuilt voice activated system :)

[Mitor 10]

arma 3 should have an inbuilt voice activated system :)

True.

[cjph 0]

I tried GlovePie and Ratszo's profile last night and had it up and running in seconds. Performance seemed better than Pilfluis used to be, and needs a couple tweaks to get 100 spot on. Can recommend it.

cj