Voice Commands - Tied into UI

Anyone ever play Sacrifice?

Bind a group of units to "1" the player character would say, "You are group one."
When you selected them the character would say, "Group one!"
Change their formation to a semi-circle and it'd say, "Semi-circle formation!"
Tell them to attack and it'd say, "Attack this target!"

Now what if we could just SAY orders that could supplement how we play.

I always found it a nightmare to bind/remember/select camera locations with F-keys. And what if you forget which F-key has the "Land-bridge" or "Southern expansion" selected?

What if you could say, "Bind Land-bridge" and have a camera location bound to the phrase "Land-bridge"
Then if you said, "View Land-bridge" it would pan to that location.
Select some units and say "Move to Land-bridge" and they've move to your preset location without having to pan back there to give the order.

You could just say, "Move to <saved location>" and selected units will move to your pre-saved location.

Now imagine if you could bind a word or phrase to anything. Select their anti-nuke silo and say, "Unitbind Thisgottago". Then once your fleet of bombers/artillery is constructed, you could simply select them and say, "Attack Thisgottago"

Before you question my sanity, remember that voice recognition has improved markedly in the last few years and I see it least utilized on the PC. Why can't voice commands be an additional way to interact with our normal games instead of some ridiculous gimmick?

Comments?

tl;dr: Voice commands to supplement standard control schemes and allow unit-selecting, view-saving and more.
tl;dr tl;dr: Shout at screen -> profit.

I don't think that is a good idea, at all. No offense, but it sounds a little bit like that Kinect nonsense MS tries to pull of with the new XBone. Don't get me wrong, the concept is interesting but it also is inferior to the input method we currently use, mouse & keyboard. Just think of how "long" it takes to say one of these phrases compared to the short amount of time that is required to press a key.
In addition to that voice recognition software is not cheap and it would also take quite some effort to iron out all teething problems that will come with it.

Voice commands can be implemented as mod fairly easy if Uber make HTML5 devices API work in Coherent UI. E.g currently this functionality is found inside Coherent, but we still lack of some interface which required to "ask" user about access to microphone or web cam.

If devs do that for us we'll able to use Google Speech API and implement it easily.

No offence taken. I wasn't talking about it as a replacement at all. That IS a dumb idea. But you can press buttons and speak at the same time, can't you?

Additionally, with a very limited dictionary (possible words to match) the accuracy of voice recognition improves immensely.

EXACTLY. I certainly wasn't suggesting it as something for Uber to work on but rather provide us with the capability to implement it.

The Google Speech API is exactly the reason why I began getting fascinated by how we can supplement our mouse/keyboard with voice actions.

Even if it was only limited to snapping to pre-saved cam locations to help us navigate between planets, I think it'd be vastly useful. The power comes from the ability to define your own arbitrary keyword like "My base", "First Target", "The Moon" or even simply "Alpha"/"Tango"/"Bravo".

Google Speech API just convert your voice to text, so there is no limits what you can do with it. Mostly all user input in PA handled by javascript in UI, so everything you can done with hotkey can be easily bind to such "voice command".

Few months ago I played with speech API and implement few simple commands for my PC. I'll say fair it's depends a lot on how well this it's recognize exactly your voice and for me it's doesn't work too good. E.g some people have really well recognition with very low percent of failures, while others have lot of failures.

I don't disagree that it'd be nigh impossible to make it a "perfect" solution.

One example of a compromise would be that you press a single key and then speak a word/phrase to bind a map location and then press a single key and speak the same word to return to that location.

That way you could save a potentially unlimited number of locations and return to them.

But what I meant by "if it was only limited to" was that it might only be desirable for limited scenarios/use-cases such as (my favorite) camera location saving/viewing.

I imagine, in the future, voice commands being easily obtainable for games much like how customization key-binds, mouse-binds and macros are today.

Edit: Nice example of existing technology for this type of need.

The issue with this tech is that because it is external to the game and essentially unsupported, it has to input keystrokes/mouse-clicks. If games had a input-source specifically for voice commands then it wouldn't interfere with your keyboard/mouse controls at all.

Pretty sure EndWar did this already.

That said, the scope of EW was more Starcrafty. And the UI was clunky as hell.

It's not problem for PA because user input handling is not hardcoded.

I was just recently thinking about the exact same thing. This would enhance the experience and simplify many things.

I think a moderator (@cola_colin, bitte ) should move this to [REQ] Mods! Since this would be a really awesome mod and enhance the 'regular game' and also mods which derive from the traditional PA.

TheGurken

I am a big fan of pushing buttons, so this isnt something for me. I can press buttons faster than speak commands. Also what about playing with loud music? What if I want to sing this awesome song while playing?
Also @kongkilla: If the OP wants to do a mod request he can do it himself. However the mod forums isnt even meant to be a pool of requests.

I'd be happy if voice chat was implemented in this game. Not for controlling the UI, but just for communicating with your teammates. It would make playing team-armies with randoms that much easier.

As long as it is possible for us to accept microphone input into the UI then it should be possible to build in voice-command support into the game.

If it's not for you, it's not for you. I personally enjoy music during games too, so I wouldn't necessarily use this system all the time except perhaps if I was in a serious ranked game or large-scale game. Keyword tagging (of units/areas) is really the best use of this kind of system and something that is literally impossible with a standard keyboard/mouse (unless you use one of those keyboards that has a touchscreen). Saving a specific area with a name is a heck of a lot better than saving it to F1 or F2.

Also, Mavor said he wanted to use the new Steam controller and I think that voice commands would really help it to easily pull off some of the more niche commands / inputs.

If the capability exists, someone will do it. Whether it'll be good or not is simply too early to tell. I think that once someone does it REALLY WELL then people will be less skeptical. It's all in the implementation.

I'm think voice control it's for different subset of players who don't need to press buttons as fast as you

IMHO: Waste of time. There's so many different things missing that adding voice comms should be least of a priority.

Nobody said developers should implement voice control at all. They just need to let us use functions which found in Coherent UI.

In my opinion and experience voice commands are quite fun. However, they are far slower and less accurate than mouse and keyboard.

Also I think Neutrino said that there will be no ingame voice chat. So I doubt Uber will implement voice control.
Conclusion: Good luck modders.

Voice commands are great...
Unless you're mute, deaf, a non-english speaker, have a regional accent, have a speech impediment, don't own a microphone, like to listen to music or watch videos while gaming without headphones, use your computer in a high noise environment, use your computer late at night or early in the morning and don't live alone, are in a room with other people who don't want to be disturbed or enjoy shouting "Computer, self-destruct commander!" into your mic, use Skype, TeamSpeak or other VOIP client while playing, have a high APM, go to LAN parties, commentate or cast on games while playing them or game on a laptop in public and don't want to look insane or just feel awkward talking to machines.

Now Uber, where's my Pop'n Music Controller support? It'll probably be more useful to most players.

^ Living proof that sarcasm will get you everywhere.

Plenty of people use comms. Personally, I use push-to-talk, otherwise everyone hears my background audio. Since voice recognition tech has improved amazingly, they cope with an awful lot of background audio.

Obviously it depends entirely upon the quality of the implementation. But if we don't try, we'll never know. To simply attack an idea because it "might suck" or "might not be desirable" is idiotic. Many of the things we take for granted are things that met those categories or were simply not asked for.

Heck, I was annoyed when RTSes started using right-click for orders instead of left. And left was still for buildings. It seemed so dumb. But now I'm used to it.

Many of the things you listed are simply wrong:
Mute / Deaf - Sure, but there's plenty of other features they couldn't enjoy either that people want like comms and sound/music.
Non-english - Sure, because there's no non-english dictionaries are there? FAIL
Accent - Depends on the accent and the software. With a limited dictionary you can use calibration to hugely improve recognition. Have the user say "Attack" and "Move" (etc) a few times and it'll work.
Speech Impediment - see above. Although it'd work less for stutters.
Don't own a microphone - So buy one? What if I don't have a screen? Should no-one make graphics?
Listen to Music / Watch Videos - this audio, if coming from the computer, can be cancelled-out and a lot of microphones do it automatically. But this is essentially the same as the above since you could solve it yourself.
High-noise / late / early - Sure but same issue with using any voice software including comms.
Shouting - Shouting? Really? Yea, I see people shouting at their iPhones all the time since Siri can't hear them... /sarcasm
Skype/Teamspeak/VOIP - Push-to-talk or Push-to-mute.
High APM - Sure, because having MORE APM is always bad? Can't speak and press buttons at the same time?
Go to LAN Parties - Yea, mic interference could be an issue but isn't impossible to solve. If you have a headset mic you can usually say things pretty quietly.
Commentate/Cast - Maybe you'd dislike it but I personally think that hearing a caster SAY voice commands in the game would not bother me and I don't see why it should bother anyone.
Look insane in public - Really? People talk to their phones ALL THE TIME. It's normal. Come to present time.
Feel awkward talking to machines - Machines are our friends, they're not the borg. See above.

Almost all of the problems depend on implementation. It might not work, it might work amazingly, but it'd be nice to have the ability to try.

Well, I'm not going to get into a point-by-point debate with a voice commands zealot, but if Microsoft couldn't make people use voice commands with their marketing and R&D billions with the Kinect, you're probably not going to be successful with your no money.

You don't need to create your own speech recognition, Google already have pretty good service for this purpose. Everything you need it's little of JavaScript programming.