Ultimate Arcade III / Speech recognition

[VMJ Team]

Well, I've purchased all of the material and started construction.  I don't have any photos yet, but I'll be posting pics on the MameRoom website very soon.  I have bigger and better plans for this cabinet than the last ones.  I'll be scrapping the whole keyboard drawer design on this cab.  Ultimate Arcade III will have a cordless keyboard/mouse tucked away somewhere (it's called the airboard).  

A heads up...I've been playing around with Microsoft's Speech Recognition Developers Kit.  I've added another project to my "spare-time" list.  An add-on to a mame front-end with full voice recognition capabilities.  The early tests that I've done show that this is not only possible, but can be very accurate (depending on the length of the training session).  It could even be possible to play "hands-free".  Although this defeats the purpose of building a cool cabinet, it's possible though.

Anyways,  it appears that the buyer may have backed out of our arrangement and I need a new buyer for the Ultimate Arcade III cabinet.  It is so early in the development stages, that it can be customized/designed to the new buyer's preference.  I'll be accepting bits in an auction style manner.  Please email me with a bid if interested in the Ultimate Arcade III cabinet.

Thanks
CyberPunk
cyberpunk@cybertechdesign.net

[Jonathan_the_Red]

Just FYI, I'm planning to use SAPI in some of my own stuff. This sounds like a good candidate for open-sourcing

I think speech recognition would be most useful in the front end, not in the game itself. Be very nice to be able to just say "play Pac-Man" and have it launch.

[darkmanx]

yeah, then when something crashes you can set it to respond to "f$*@ you, you motherf%^#$!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and it will shut itself off.  

[ArcadeFX]

This is very easy to do.  All you need is Game Commander (http://www.gamecommander.com/).  I have used this with ArcadeFX and it should work with any other FE or application or game.

Here is a blurb of what game commander can do.

"Game Commander is a voice control application for games. Many of today's games have a lot of keyboard commands that can be hard to remember. Game Commander takes you to the next level of gaming by enabling you to control most Windows

[Jonathan_the_Red]

I like reinventing the wheel, dammit Besides, it wouldn't be entirely reinventing the wheel... we've got SAPI.

I've got a couple of reasons (besides the challenge) for not wanting to use GameCommander. First, it appears that in GC you have to individually create each command. I'd like to be able to have my FE scan my game list and automatically create a speech recognition command for each based on the game's name, kind of like what Windows Media Player does with Plus! XP installed. Second, I need to be able to execute macros based on not only voice commands, but also data received over the serial port. Long story. And third, I want to have audible feedback to commands, which GC supports, but I want the feedback to be generated using text-to-speech, so it can include the name of the game it's gonna play.

[)p(]

I Long story. And third, I want to have audible feedback to commands, which GC supports, but I want the feedback to be generated using text-to-speech, so it can include the name of the game it's gonna play.

I use the ms agent technology in Emulaxian to do the text to speech...and for fun did some experiments with speech recognition...I must say it was very fun especially shooting the galaxians...left left left...shoot  

Peter

[Dudah]

Would that happen to be Micro$oft Speech SDK? My friend Aaroncake who made an MP3 computer for his car has that on it. his website is http://www.aaroncake.net I believe if you wanna check it out. Best of luck!

-Dudah

[RacerX]

I have played with this too.  I wrote a little front-end in Visual Basic using Microsoft's speech recognition.  I was able to say, "Play Donkey-Kong" and it would fire off the game.  I wanted to find a front-end that was already written and just add this code to it (I'm lazy that way  ), but I gave up trying to find one written in VB that was open source.

[1UP]

What sucks about voice input is all the damn setting up before you can even use it.

[Jonathan_the_Red]

1UP--

Yeah, I wouldn't want to use speech in a game, either (apart from being slow and inaccurate, it also strikes me as cheating). I'm much more interested in it for the front end.

Microsoft operating systems have a built-in speech subsystem, and separate vendors can plug in their own recognition engines. For each user, it maintains a "speech profile". The practical upshot of this is that you can spend a few minutes training, and your speech recognition will be improved over all apps that use it.

Not only that, but training often isn't even necessary. There are two main types of speech recognition: dictation and voice commands. With dictation, you're speaking text and the computer is translating it into the written word. Dictation is a very, very computationally difficult problem, and a lot of training is required to get anywhere near acceptable accuracy. Voice commands are a much simpler problem. With voice commands, there's a relatively small list of valid words, and the recognition engine is just trying to decide if you've said one of them. Modern speech recognition engines have advanced to the point where they can do quite well at voice commands without any training at all.

If you have Windows XP, try installing the Plus! XP pack and firing up Windows Media Player. If you plug in a microphone, you can say "play artist Pink Floyd" and the recognition will be good enough without any training to do just that.

By the way, it's really unfair to compare your computer to your remote control. Your computer is a behemoth that runs a cycle in a billionth of a second and has hundreds of millions of bytes of RAM. Your remote control is a stupid little logic controller with virtually no memory. You'd darned well better believe your computer will do a better job at speech recognition.