Articulate: Squad Voice Command Utility for Arma 3

[m101 1]

thanks it worked

[Mpstark 13]

Only a couple of things to iron out before we release a 0.2.1 development preview.

[kremator 1065]

Nice work! Looking forward to what you have in store for us.

[Mpstark 13]

0.2.1 release has been posted. Find it in the usual place at https://github.com/Mpstark/articulate/releases

• New: New command alternate phrases from your suggestions. Wiki has been updated with them.
  
• New: Advanced settings menu.
  
• New: Command Termination Pause option. Adjust higher to give yourself more time between words.
  
• New: Command Key (PTT, PTI, PTA) now accepts combinations of keys.
  
• New: Can have more than one Command Key.
  
• New: Command Keys can have mouse keys included.
  
• New: Should load UI a mite quicker.
  
• Fixed: Detects Arma 2 Operation Arrowhead.
  
• Fixed: Push-to-arm now turns off after a second click of the command key.
  
• Fixed: Crash relating to running Arma as admin.

[Harzach 2517]

At the risk of repeating myself, outstanding work here. Beautifully uncomplicated, even with the new advanced features. Looking forward to possibly using this in DCS...

[Mpstark 13]

At the risk of repeating myself, outstanding work here. Beautifully uncomplicated, even with the new advanced features. Looking forward to possibly using this in DCS...

Thanks! Benjamin (SPARTAN-563) is again responsible for most of the improvements in this release. I continue to stumble along trying to make the backend of the application better (read: so that it could be customizable and usable with other applications).

[skadog 0]

Sweet update, I can now bind the mouse button I use for PTT / VOIP to PTI / Articulate. So much better now!

[ATTACKM0DE 10]

Thanks Mpstark for this awesome program. I have used it a bit and it is proving it's self a vital component of Arma 3 for me. I have just noticed you have updated the commands with more phrases including the big one for me - "Regroup". You have saved me and my AI from getting shot in the face as I often forget what to say to get them to return. Now when I instinctively say "Regroup" it will work!! Yes!!!

Also, I think you mentioned somewhere that there was a possibility that you might incorporate commands for opening the compass and such.. Is that still on the cards?? and thanks again on your great work!

[Mpstark 13]

Thanks Mpstark for this awesome program. I have used it a bit and it is proving it's self a vital component of Arma 3 for me. I have just noticed you have updated the commands with more phrases including the big one for me - "Regroup". You have saved me and my AI from getting shot in the face as I often forget what to say to get them to return. Now when I instinctively say "Regroup" it will work!! Yes!!!

Also, I think you mentioned somewhere that there was a possibility that you might incorporate commands for opening the compass and such.. Is that still on the cards?? and thanks again on your great work!

Glad to oblige. Note that I should not take all of the credit since Benjamin (SPARTAN-563) has been a huge part of the recent changes. Note that small changes like adding/removing alternate phrases for commands and changing the keys that are pressed in response will hopefully be part of a settings menu sometime in the future along with the ability to add/remove entire commands. This will open the way for support for other games, user-built mods, and even perhaps an official Articulate Arma 3 mod.

[Harzach 2517]

Any chance to get support for unit numbers above ten?

F12 shifts you up to the next ten units, while F11 shifts down. For example, focusing unit 25 would be:

F12, F12, F5, F11, F11

The two F11s "zero" the unit bar for the next command.

Edited October 15, 2013 by Harzach

[spartan563 10]

@Herzach We've considered that approach, however it has the obvious drawback of being incapable of handling situations where the user has manually moved the bar (F11/F12) prior to executing the command. While it is theoretically possible to get around this by pressing F11 a few times before navigating the bar - one needs to keep in mind that we need approximately 100ms per keystroke (for the game engine to recognize that a key was pressed) which would imply that your average command on units 20-30 would take 0.8s to complete.

It also introduces an overhead on all other commands (except "all"/"team"/"squad" selectors) of 200-300ms for "zeroing" the unit bar.

I personally feel that it would be better for us to hold off on implementing this functionality until a dedicated addon can be created which negates the need to emulate key-presses - therefore allowing us to instantly execute commands on specific units with certainty as to which unit we're executing the commands on.

In the mean time, maybe we can implement a "next page"/"previous page" command to press F12/F11 respectively? From there you will be able to select units 11-20 using the standard "one", "two" etc. selectors.

[Ratcatcher722 0]

Hi,

This looks really interesting, however either I'm missing something or its not working very well. I have installed it fine ( win7 64 with English UK Keyboard/voice ) I have the latest build ( 0.2.1 ). When in game I can select the various units ( 1 - 7, etc ) they highlight and then the text box pops up allowing further commands that I have to click to action. Is that correct?

As having read through the posts and looking at the vid it looks like you should be able to give further commands verbally ( assign team red, etc??? ). When I try this I dont get any response other than the text box coming up.

Sorry if i'm being a doof! :)

[Alpha-Kilo 36]

Ratcatcher

It is true that some commands have to be given in a combination of voice and key input. For example "Two, get in vehicle" works verbally, but the position driver, gunner, etc has to be specified by pushing a button. Assigning AI subordinates to a team works well, however. Say: "Two, Three and Four, assign Red!" In the current build the commands are hardcoded and you cannot add your own custom voice commands. This is planned for a future version. For a link to the wiki which lists the available commands please refer to the first posting in this thread.

[Ratcatcher722 0]

Hey Alpha-Kilo,

Many thanks for the reply... OK, quick update. I just got it working. I think I was leaving too much gap between the unit and the command!

Thanks again for your help.

Edited October 20, 2013 by Ratcatcher722

[spartan563 10]

Hey everyone,

It's been a bit of a slow week for Michael and me, with work and life stealing away time that would otherwise be spent on this project. In light of this, our latest release doesn't have the same massive number of changes you've become accustomed to - this release is actually more of a back-end revamp for much of the UI and Key Press emulation code to ensure that it works for everyone before we start implementing new functionality on it for the next release.

Changes

- Support for localized user interfaces through the use of translation files.

- Support for compound key presses (so we can send commands like Shift + F1 to ArmA, this is not yet being used).

- Minor UI tweaks to enhance usability

Translation

The translation engine I've implemented allows you to select the language you wish to use from the new languages menu. Articulate will attempt to default to the language you have set on your PC if you haven't selected an alternate translation from the languages page.

At the moment we are only shipping an English translation, but the objective of this release is to give people who are interested in contributing translations the chance to develop their own and test them out. If you're one of those lovely folks then please take a look at our Translating Articulate wiki page for information on how you can go about doing so - and feel free to ask any questions you may have about it here, I'll do my best to help you.

And as always, if you have any suggestions about new features you'd like to see implemented (that haven't already been listed on our To-do page) please let us know.

Regards,

Benjamin Pannell

Edited October 24, 2013 by SPARTAN-563

[Alpha-Kilo 36]

Spartan-563

When I try to reach the linked Translating Articulate wiki page I get 404 error. Same result when I try to access it through GitHub.

[spartan563 10]

Sorry about that, it should be fixed now.

[KaneSvK 1]

Hi, im interested in trying this mod , but its not working for me and I don't know why. I have windows 7 with speech recognition. I tried it with 2 diffrent microphones, had them placed straight in front of my mouth, i tried both PTT and continuous modes (diffrent confidence level), i did train in windows. As far as I know both mics are working, I tested it with echo service on skype. About month ago i was trying to use Voice Activated commands trial version and it worked well, understood me about 95% of things i said, so it shouldnt be a problem with my accent. When I tried articulate today it recognized some of my phrases, but even very very soon after that it didnt recognize them again. I ve tried pretty much anything I can think off. Do you have any idea what else might be wrong?

[spartan563 10]

It could be any number of things, keep in mind that Articulate will not work anywhere near as well (or at all) if you try to use the same dictation format as you would have used for VAC. Where VAC attempts to recognize single discrete commands and translate those into keystrokes, Articulate attempts to recognize sentences and translate those into sequences of keystrokes to carry out a given command. So where with VAC you would say "Two (pause) Three (pause) Four (pause) Face Direction (pause) North", Articulate expects you to say "Two, Three, Four, Face Direction North". You can tweak the maximum time between words under Advanced Settings if you find yourself regularly pausing between words for long enough that Articulate believes you've finished the command.

If you're still having issues after reading this, could you please provide some more information on what you mean by your statement? Going into the Articulate UI and saying commands - does it display the command you expected, or does is display "What was that?". Does adjusting your confidence margin (under Settings) have any effect?

[ru55lee 2]

IGNORE...(already found the answer :D )

Edited November 1, 2013 by ru55lee

[spartan563 10]

Hi everyone,

Release time again - this time addressing a few irritating UI quirks (freezes and the like) and adding a German translation, thanks to Alpha-Kilo for that. Another nice addition is the presence of a context (right-click) menu for the tray-icon, allowing you to close Articulate without opening up the UI, a little change but one that makes a surprisingly large difference in practice.

We've also been working on the backend to help streamline how commands are executed, this has the advantage of both reducing the overhead of dispatching commands and allowing us to design considerably more flexible output scenarios. One of the cool new options this has opened up is the ability for us to implement output schemes which don't necessarily make use of Keyboard/Mouse output emulation, for example: sending data directly to ArmA through an Addon or controlling other applications through any APIs they provide.

Changes

- German translation courtesy of Alpha-Kilo

- Fixes to the English translation on the languages page

- Fixes some UI elements not updating when the language is changed

- Added a context menu to the tray icon

- Fixes a UI freeze when adjusting command timeout values

- Improvements to the way output operations (key presses) are dispatched - reduces overhead

- More backend work to make supporting customizable commands possible

SQF/Addon Developers?

This neatly brings me to the next point on our list of things to do. One of our goals for this project is to provide the ability to execute commands without requiring keyboard/mouse emulation (as it is slow, imprecise at times and restrictive in terms of what we can do with it), at the moment we're looking at something similar to JayArmA2Lib or XHSI_A3_MFD which would allow us to directly gather information, and send commands to the game. Ideally this would allow us to handle > 10 units in a squad without having to resort to the rather hacky F11, F11, F12, F1, F11 "solution", as well as allowing context specific commands like "All, move there" issuing a move order to your current cursorPosition.

Unfortunately, Michael and I are not the best of SQF programmers, especially when it comes to writing up complex Addons for ArmA. As such, we'd like to ask for anyone in the ArmA community with the requisite scripting knowledge to provide this functionality (I can handle any Extension development if necessary) who'd be willing to help out to get in touch with either one of us.

Regards,

Benjamin Pannell

[dethica 2]

I am having trouble assigning team blue/red/etc. The UI displays my command correctly (two three assign team red) but it just does not work in game.

I am using the latest arma3 dev branch build.

overall, seems to work great.

Edited November 6, 2013 by DeThiCa

[blackdawg 1]

I'm having the same issue only with the latest build. I revert to earlier build and it works fine. Known Issue?

[Alpha-Kilo 36]

I confirm the issue.

In order to verify it, I placed a standard rifle squad under my command and a few empty vehicles in the editor and ordered the guys around. Commands such as "copy my stance", "crouch", "go prone", "stand up", "get in vehicle", "hold fire", "open fire", and others were carried out by individuals and by the whole squad as ordered. I have not tested every command but I think I covered quite a few. The "assign team" commands were shown in the user interface but ignored by the AI. I didn't use any mods or addons except ShackTacHud and the latest version of Articulate in this experiment. Both ArmA3 and Articulate were running with admin rights. As blackdawg already pointed out, older builds of Articulate worked fine.

I am willing to test it more thoroughly if necessary.

Edited November 8, 2013 by Alpha-Kilo

[spartan563 10]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the bug reports - I'll look into it and try to reproduce the issue on my side. Could you let me know if commands such as "all watch direction east" aren't working as well, as that may indicate that it is an issue with delays which isn't experienced with shorter commands.

Thanks,

Benjamin Pannell