Yeah I've been thinking about a "push to talk" option. It would probably avoid most problems. My highly sensitive mic picks up "Pause" when I type or breath heavily, so I changed it to "pause game" and that helped. Not to mention my brother yelling "dive dive dive" every time he walks in to the room and laughing. If you tune the pronunciation sensitivity in the control panel > speech this is rarely an issue though.
I actually have some code already where I can monitor the status of a key. So I could build this in and probably will. Basically you just need the Perl script to monitor a particular key and if it's not down, throw away the recognized voice command. I don't think it would be efficient to actually start and stop the Python recognizer component with this key, as there would be some overhead to launching it and probably wouldn't respond quickly enough.
But isn't this an amusing feature? Especially when you're running on headphones so she can't hear the game?
Wife: Honey, I'll be right back, emergency at the neighbors house, you know how they are.
SH4: Back Emergency, Aye Sir!
You: Full speed ahead!
Wife: It's not that big of a deal, I'm not rushing over there. Her problems are always on the surface.
SH4: Surface the boat, aye sir!
You: Crash dive!
Wife: Don't be melodramatic. I don't think her marriage is heading for a "crash dive" like you're always saying. She just sets a small fire once in a while for attention.
SH4: Firing tube one, aye sir!
You: Dammit. Close tube one.
Wife: Secure from silence! Blow Ballast! Tube 3! Fire! Tube 4! Fire! Knuckle left! Ramming speed!
You: I want a divorce.
Of course, if your wife really loves you, she'd XO your boat lol. You would stand around in a captain's hat and your underwear and relay casually-phrased orders to her, and she would actually speak the correctly enunciated orders into the mic and confirm the setting - after all, the helmsmen generally don't react directly to the captain's order, it's all through the XO right? And it's a bit of an immersion breaker when you ask for one thing and occasionally get another or a bad recognition and have to correct it manually. The wife would shield you from all that, resulting in the perfect sim!
Let me know if any of you find a woman like that. 