Yeah, I realize some SH3 people may have not followed the SH4Speech development at all so they don't know what they're really looking at here.
"Shoot" and similar tools have been used to do voicerec in games like this, but the problem is that they are generally limited to keystrokes only. Traditionally, the only way to automate even a mouse click is to use "macro" type software, but that is disconnected from voice rec. Additionally, the mouse clicks in SH can be very complex - clicking and dragging a dial right 30 degrees, for example.
That is where shSpeech shines. The idea from the start was to create a completely open system that anyone could customize, that supported keystrokes, mouse clicks, and complex interaction with the various SH dials. Keeping the whole design open allowed TomcatTwo to port it to SH3.
Of course, before attacking the complex problem of dials, I wanted to be sure it was worth it in the sense that the recognition would be accurate using the Microsoft Speech SDK system. Many people have had bad experiences with that, but usually related to attempting to dictate a few sentences to MS Word. Usually after this experience, most people chalk voice recognition up to a novelty that still needs years of work before it is usable (which is still true in many ways.)
As it turns out though, since the total number of commands used to communicate to SH are very low relative to the entire english dictionary, and as a result, the recognition is very, very good. Much better than general dictation which has to figure out what you're saying across hundreds of thousands of words, strung together in quickly spoken sentences. Being a much smaller data set to work with, MS SAPI works great.
My experience and experiments manipulating the keyboard, and mouse cursor with various dials including click/drag, and scaling it to any resolution were good and that's all I needed, and in a month it was done. The result was better than I imagined, better than any generalized third-party voice recognition system out there (for SH, anyway!), and combined with great recognition, it's a lot of fun and immersion that no other mod can touch!
*sales pitch over*
