Speakeasy VoiceAttack profile

[woofer808 74]

Speakeasy is a profile for the voice control software Voice Attack made by woofer and Alpha-Kilo. Both authors have several years of experience with voice control software for Arma 3. Woofer has published a profile for Voice Attack and made several videos which show how immersive voice control can be. Alpha-Kilo has experimented with all sorts of voice control software since 2009 and published profiles and key sheets for Voice Attack, Voice Activated Commands and Livrot Mic Command. They teamed up to create Speakeasy which is one of the most ambitious projects for voice control in Arma 3.

 

With Voice Attack and Speakeasy you can use your voice as an extra controller beside your keyboard, mouse, joystick etc. Speakeasy covers all commands of vanilla Arma 3 and a selection of popular modifications including ACE, TFAR, ACRE, Command & Control and more. All currently supported mods are listed in the key sheet which is in the Speakeasy package. You can also use Speakeasy to control your game-related hardware and software. Just say the word to take a screenshot, centre your TrackIR, or toggle your RealLight visual effects.

 

Speakeasy comes with several unique features:

• Call your AI subordinates by their role instead of memorizing their numbers: "Grenadier, flank left!", "MG, open fire!"
• Use auto-movement for long marches and hold a drink in your hand instead of keeping [W] pressed down forever.
• Speak your chat messages into the mic instead of typing them.
• Use Speakeasy as a voice recorder for a quick memo instead of typing or writing it down.
• Use compound commands for standard situations such as attacking, retreating, preparing an ambush, etc. A single command is enough to order your squad into the right formation, stance, combat mode, let them select targets and engage the enemy or break contact and return to the player.
• A set of templates makes it easy to add your own commands to the Speakeasy profile.

 

Speakeasy supports different international keyboard layouts and system languages. Out of the box the following keyboard layouts are supported:

• Canadian (Fr) QWERTY
• Canadian (ML) QWERTY
• French AZERTY
• German QWERTZ
• Portuguese QWERTY
• Spanish QWERTY
• Swedish QWERTY
• UK English QWERTY
• US English QWERTY

 

You can speak your commands in English or German. Speakeasy can be translated to other languages, as well.

 

There is a training scenario that you can use to test and hone your skills for use with the Speakeasy profile. It is singleplayer and multiplayer ready. All players have access to Zeus. ACE3, TFAR and ACRE are supported but not required. You can recruit AI to build your own squad. A training compound is provided where enemies can be created dynamically on demand. 

 

Speakeasy is highly customizable. You can add or delete commands and change the key configuration and spoken phrases of existing commands. 

 

Speakeasy comes with an extensive key sheet that helps to keep track of all commands. Use it as the basis for a translation to any language that Microsoft supports or to list your individual changes to the commands. If you use a programmable controller the key sheet can be used to keep track of what each button does. You may also find the key sheet useful if you use other voice control software than Voice Attack. 

 

For your convenience Speakeasy comes with its own Arma user profile. All settings and key configurations you need to test Speakeasy are already in place. So you don't have to mess around with your existing player profile.

 

Some figures: The key sheet lists roughly 900 commands. Approximately 600 of them can be spoken. For many of the spoken commands there are several phrases, thus the Speakeasy profile has more than 1000 entries. 

 

The Speakeasy package contains:

• Speakeasy manual (English)
• Speakeasy key sheet (English and German)
• Speakeasy Arma user profile (English and German)
• Speakeasy Voice Attack profile (English and German)
• Speakeasy training scenario (English)
• Speakeasy audio files

 

Version 2.0: 

More than a year after the original release Speakeasy 2.0 is now ready for download. These are the new features: 

• Fluid Commands finally allows you to speak naturally with your AI. There is no need for the typical robotic breaks in your commands any more. We achieve this with voice commands that include calling your unit or units and the instruction in the same command. This is a new level of controlling the AI. Try it!
• Australian keyboard layout (with help from Benji and Rockapes)
• Danish keyboard layout (with help from Prestien)
• Norwegian keyboard layout
• The new training scenario is eight times bigger than the old one. It offers more options to try commands from the vanilla game and the supported add-ons. The compound where you can practice combat against enemy AI is not only bigger but also more diverse and hopefully more interesting.
• We added a Speakeasy training scenario readme which you should actually read.
• We created several new custom voice commands which make your life as a player a bit easier. 
• Several commands of the vanilla game or supported mods have been changed since the last release of Speakeasy. Version 2.0 of our profile and key sheet has been updated accordingly.
• Version 2.0 lists almost three hundred new commands that can be spoken. The new Fluid Commands feature adds a few hundred thousand more but don't worry – Voice Attack can handle a profile of this size.

 

Download the latest version of the package:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlNLK6ghe8oDsjrYCKxN7i-SNGGdnW5O/view?usp=share_link

 

Subscribe to the training scenario on Steam Workshop: 

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1601768205

 

Discord link:
https://discord.gg/MF7TAzU

 

Edited April 20, 2023 by woofer808
Update of links

[Alpha-Kilo 36]

 

Information about Speakeasy is also available in German at ArmaWorld: 

https://armaworld.de/index.php?thread/3326-speakeasy-sprachsteuerung-für-arma-3/&postID=33659#post33659

[mad_cheese 593]

oh.. YES!!!!

 

Thanks for the hard work on this! 

[Rockapes 103]

I loved both your VA profiles and setups before so cant wait to try this out. Thank you in advance !!

[kremator 1065]

Let me hear you say AWESOME !!!!

 

[nomisum 129]

Impressive work

[xon2 102]

When time permits and my arma addiction strikes again....i will sure give your guys new package a go.

[xon2 102]

Hey lads,

 

just wanted to mention what i have come across at the official DCS forums yesterday. I think at least two aspects might pertain to gripes/limitations you have pointed out when it comes to VA and arma 3. In case you are not familiar with VAICOM for DCS, its been the go-to VA plugin to speak to JTACS and ATCs as well as general AI commanding and ordering your wingman. But since DCS exists as two different versions right now, beta and alpha (big 2.5 merge coming), and a lot fo stuff is changing all the time, there were some issues getting it to work correctly. Keyboard configs, ingame keycommand menu changes etc.

 

It essentially had (if i am not mistaken) the same problem as all VA profiles for arma have, that it depended on window's directx keyboard commands to integrate with the game. It seems VAICOM's dev. Hollywood_315 has been busy rewriting the code to directly integrate with DCS via lua files. Post 728 outlines whats planned for his next big release.

https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3219532&postcount=728

 

Second, the same question about ''fluidity of commands'' came up. Atm, VA is not as powerful as the program 'articulate' in this regard, although i have not checked your latest release thouroghly as of yet. If i recall correctly, you mentioned to have made some progress on that front as well. Anyway, apparently VAICAOM 2.5 will have a new algorythm to discern commands from whole phrases.

https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3226313&postcount=738

 

 

Hollywood is a nice enough fellow, so maybe he might share his experience and give you guys a pointer or two how he achieves the direct integration into a game via lua to bypass the virtual windows keyboard and how his algorythm for fluid phrases is set up. Interested what you think of this. Getting both to work for arma as well would really make VA a robust thing for ai commanding. Woofer, you were going through the troubles that happen with arma 3's framerate drops and how this affects VA's keyboard inputs. You were mentioning that direct game integration would be the dream to overcome all kinds of issues. And, different keyboard layouts should not be an issue anymore, too.

 

 

 

[woofer808 74]

Yep, VAICOM 2.5 seems to be all that I would want for Arma as well. I haven't been able to get to working on something similar for Speakeasy yet, though. The short and curly of it is that it's simply over my current skill level as a programmer. So I've been focusing on trying to get Speakeasy as far as I can take it with the basic VA techniques before tackling that problem.

 

As you pointed out @xon2, there were some progress on fluid commands. I made a short video on that for anyone interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mww4GzKujU

 

I thought the method would be extremely taxing on the system as it generates around over 300 000 dynamic commands instead of 1000 in the original release. But I've been testing it for a while now and it actually seems to work just fine. Hopefully it can be included in Speakeasy, but proper testing will have to tell.

 

Anyway, I'll take a closer look, so thanks for the tip on Hollywoods' stuff. The holy grail would be that two way communication between Arma and VA where VA could send script commands to Arma and read variables from the game.

[NickEast 2]

I'm really a solo Arma player, so using voice commands to control the AI is really a must for me to enjoy the game. I first used Articulate (as it's free) but really want to customize everything to suit my needs and VoiceAttack seemed to be the best program to use. I haven't bought it just yet since I'm still trying stuff out, and I stumbled upon the aforementioned problem with VA that it's difficult to create fluid commands, especially when selecting multiple units ("1 2 3" "Hold Fire") or when issuing multiple orders to selected units without constantly reselecting them or having to do a lot of manual stuff alongside VA.

 

I'm not an experienced Arma player, having just started playing about six months ago and having just barely reached 60 hours of play time (also because I do a lot of other work most of the time), but I'm starting to really get into it now. I'm also not an experienced modder (at least not in Arma). But I am a skilled artist, designer and programmer (as I'm a starting video game developer), and I'm very interested in going more in-depth with Arma. I've looked up VAICOM for DCS and learned that the new upcoming version is going to be a plugin for VA that communicates directly with the game to send and receive data so that VA works seamlessly and without using keystrokes and other indirect shortcuts. What I've read about both VA plugin and Arma 3 Extension development is that both use .NET (aka C#) which is a language I'm proficient with.

 

What I'm trying to say is that, if I can find out more about VoiceAttack and how to develop plugins for it, as well as how to communicate with Arma 3, I want to try and develop a similar plugin as VAICOM to avoid using the command menu and instead directly execute scripts in Arma to command the AI. The only real issue I see at this point is that I don't know exactly how I could communicate between Arma 3 and VA. As far as I know, VAICOM intends to use UDP (basically ports and services) and JSON, but I'm not sure if that will work properly with Arma (I'm not that experienced in programming yet). Regardless, that's the only real issue I have; actually programming all that stuff (in C# and SQF) isn't a problem at all once I understand the APIs.

 

At this point, this is all wishful thinking. And though I'm exploring how to achieve this, progress will probably be slow. I will most likely still buy VA and create my own profile (so I can get to know VA), and try to develop a simple plugin to test. If it works, I will definitely continue with it.

 

EDIT: After a little digging, it appears there is a solution other than UDP (and which appears somewhat easier and safer) that would allow a VA plugin to send messages to an Arma 3 extension which can then execute SQF code. The extension can then send feedback back to VA to check if the command is successfully executed for example. It's still a somewhat daunting task, but I'll get started on it shortly (over the weekend maybe).

Edited December 8, 2017 by SGCommand
New information found

[xon2 102]

Maybe we should setup a discord chat for this endevour. Seems to work quite well for other mods including C2 or hte AH-64 project. Maybe we could even invite Hollywood whos doing the VAICOM  project for DCS, he sure could elaborate on how to approach this.

 

@SGCommand What resources or website do you use for your research concerning programming in and VA plugin stuff in particular?

[NickEast 2]

Mostly MSDN for general programming stuff (that's where I found out how to communicate between the two programs). For VA I searched through Google and read the manual.

 

I'm not certain whether I'm right about how I could make it work. I would have to try it out first. If not, I'll keep searching and experimenting.

 

EDIT: I started working on both the extension for Arma 3 and the plugin for VoiceAttack and so far everything seems to go fine. Once I can send messages back-and-forward between VA and Arma, I will post a separate topic detailing my intentions and progress.

[Alpha-Kilo 36]

@SGCommand, this is a very interesting project you are working on, and I wish you the best of luck with it. Thank you very much for sharing your plans. I helped the Articulate team a little bit and I know they had plans to let Articulate communicate directly with Arma. It is unfortunate that this did not happen. 

 

@xon2, a Speakeasy discord is already in the works. :)

[woofer808 74]

On 12/8/2017 at 10:22 PM, SGCommand said:

What I've read about both VA plugin and Arma 3 Extension development is that both use .NET (aka C#) which is a language I'm proficient with.

 

What I'm trying to say is that, if I can find out more about VoiceAttack and how to develop plugins for it, as well as how to communicate with Arma 3, I want to try and develop a similar plugin as VAICOM to avoid using the command menu and instead directly execute scripts in Arma to command the AI.

 

This is exactly what I was hoping for. I hit the wall at the exact same place. I don't know how to technically build mods, but I do think a mod coupled with a VA plugin is the way to go. But since you're proficient with .NET @SGCommand , then you're way further on than I could hope to be.

 

 

[woofer808 74]

Here's the Discord link for anyone interested:

https://discord.gg/MF7TAzU

[CANADAVE 14]

Hi.  Does voiceattack with this profile allow direct selection of commands in the ai action menu (command tree menu 6)?

 

Example - unit 3 check inventory.   Easier command of action tree menu is my biggest gripe right now.  

 

Hoping to see another video using latest profile to see fluidity.  I use articulate.  

 

Great work.  

 

 

[woofer808 74]

On 1/10/2018 at 6:12 AM, CANADAVE said:

Does voiceattack with this profile allow direct selection of commands in the ai action menu (command tree menu 6)?

 

I'm afraid not. In our testing the entries on command menu 6 don't seem to reliably end up on the same position because of context sensitivity. That's why we decided to leave it out.

 

So basically that is a perfect example of the weakness in using something that sends keystrokes to the game rather than actual Arma commands.

[Aloragon 0]

Thank you for the amazing work. I have an error can you help me?

when issuing the command 'squad' I get the error

“ release by variable [_keycode192 ] not set. No keys released. “

“Key down by variable [_keycode192 ] not set. No keys pressed. “

 

Edit: I managed to make it work. I went into the squad command in Voice attack and changed the value to '`'

[woofer808 74]

On 1/31/2018 at 8:07 AM, Aloragon said:

Thank you for the amazing work. I have an error can you help me?

when issuing the command 'squad' I get the error

“ release by variable [_keycode192 ] not set. No keys released. “

“Key down by variable [_keycode192 ] not set. No keys pressed. “

 

Edit: I managed to make it work. I went into the squad command in Voice attack and changed the value to '`'

 

It would seem that your profile isn't executing the initialization command "F_init" and/or the keyboard language layout handler "F_keyboardLayout" properly.

The "Execute a command each time this profile is loaded" in the profile options window needs to be ticked and have F_init selected in the drop-down menu. This is already done if the profile is imported with the basic "Import profile" on the main screen as opposed to "import commands" from the "edit a profile" window. It might be that you imported the profile into an empty already existing profile using the latter.

 

Your fix will work fine, but some other stuff might get wonky on you. Though that is based on the guess I made on what the cause might be.

[ICloakI 1]

On 2/3/2018 at 1:04 PM, woofer808 said:

 

It would seem that your profile isn't executing the initialization command "F_init" and/or the keyboard language layout handler "F_keyboardLayout" properly.

The "Execute a command each time this profile is loaded" in the profile options window needs to be ticked and have F_init selected in the drop-down menu. This is already done if the profile is imported with the basic "Import profile" on the main screen as opposed to "import commands" from the "edit a profile" window. It might be that you imported the profile into an empty already existing profile using the latter.

 

Your fix will work fine, but some other stuff might get wonky on you. Though that is based on the guess I made on what the cause might be.

I too am experiencing _keycode192 I've done everything you said but when I start VoiceAttack I get the following message; Stopped command, 'F_init' : focus lost.

My os is windows 10 pro, VA is running in Admin and compatible mode windows 7, I even tried 8, I tried giving VA folder special permissions.  I do however get this message Shortcut : 'F_interruptKey' as I am typing this post.  Saying Squad does nothing but give me that error message Release by variable [_keyCode192] not set.  No keys released. Key down by variable [_keyCode192] not set.  No keys pressed. So what do I do now?

[woofer808 74]

We can start by establishing that the reason you get the _keycode192 not set error is because F_init isn't run properly. The keycodes are in fact set up in F_init.

 

Just now, ICloakI said:

I too am experiencing _keycode192 I've done everything you said but when I start VoiceAttack I get the following message; Stopped command, 'F_init' : focus lost.

 

I get the "focus lost" error a little now and then when I start VA while something else (like Arma) is running. Especially if I keep tabbing between other programs while VA is starting up. It doesn't really have anything to do with the actual profile, but with VA itself as far as I have been able to tell. But you are saying you get this everytime you start VA with the profile?

 

What happens when you switch to another profile and back to Speakeasy without closing the program while the "Target" drop-down list is set to "Active Window"?

[ICloakI 1]

20 hours ago, woofer808 said:

We can start by establishing that the reason you get the _keycode192 not set error is because F_init isn't run properly. The keycodes are in fact set up in F_init.

 

 

I get the "focus lost" error a little now and then when I start VA while something else (like Arma) is running. Especially if I keep tabbing between other programs while VA is starting up. It doesn't really have anything to do with the actual profile, but with VA itself as far as I have been able to tell. But you are saying you get this everytime you start VA with the profile?

 

What happens when you switch to another profile and back to Speakeasy without closing the program while the "Target" drop-down list is set to "Active Window"?

Always start with the simple things first when problem solving they said in PC class, I guess the same applies with software.

 Detected keyboard layout: US (67699721)
Speakeasy is running
Then dot dot dot, etc

I tested it and it's working now. I can't believe I overlooked this or didn't even try it, then again I haven't been using VA for that long.  Well at least I learned something new now thanks to you. Thanks for helping me sorry for any inconvenience and thanks for your work. 

[a_killer_wombat 120]

 

On 10/10/2017 at 7:59 PM, woofer808 said:

 

Speakeasy comes with several unique features:

• Call your AI subordinates by their role instead of memorizing their numbers: "Grenadier, flank left!", "MG, open fire!"

 

How did you get this feature to work? I thought voice commands simply translate into a sequence of automatic key presses but there are no keys bindings in vanilla Arma which allow for such a feature?

[woofer808 74]

 
 
How did you get this feature to work? I thought voice commands simply translate into a sequence of automatic key presses but there are no keys bindings in vanilla Arma which allow for such a feature?

You are quite right. It all happens within the profile though. You first have to assign a specific unit to a role at the beginning of a mission using voice. That stores the correct unit number in a variable.

The code is more or less:
[Two] [assign mg] - stores 2 in {mg_variable}, the machine gunner class.

[Mg] - presses F{mg_variable}

So any unit can be a machine gunner in speakeasy and a single unit can have several roles.

Sent from my STF-L09 using Tapatalk

[Alpha-Kilo 36]

In other words: When you speak the phrase "Two, you are machine gunner!" Speakeasy will understand that "maschine gunner" is the same as the number "two" and will press "F2" when you say either the number or the role.

We have prepared several common role titles you can choose for each team member such as medic, sniper etc. This also works with vehicle crews: You can assign driver, gunner, commander and passenger roles. Roles which often appear more than once in a squad such as rifleman are numbered. You can assign "Rifleman 1", "Rifleman 2", or "Rifleman 3".  This should be sufficient in most cases. If you find that you need a role title which is not included in the Speakeasy profile you can create the command you need from a template provided with the profile.