Voice Commands for SH5

[karamazovnew]

Some of us have already used voice comands in SH3 and SH4 and it was a wonderful experience. The voice recognition program was even inteligent enough to move the mouse and click.
Now, I don't expect the devs to dedicate extra time and money to implement such a feature. But with a bit of planning and little effort, they could make a control system that would allow a simple external voice->key application to achieve amazing results in the game.
Each command, button click, textbox select, practically anything you can click with your mouse should have the option of ataching a key command to it. So for example, by pressing something like CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-R would be the same as clicking the textbox for entering Course. We would link in our external voice recog program the spoken sentence "Set new course" to CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-R.

Each item, when focused, whould expect certain commands/keys. One of them is to also break focus. So, for example you can say "Nevermind or "just kidding" to break the focus on that item. So the game also needs specific control for each item. Focus on an item should be customisable like this:
- how many seconds without player control before it breaks the focus
- how many seconds without player control before it completes the order
- how many items of info (key presses) does the item expect?
- what to do with incomplete data? after how many seconds to delete the current data without breaking focus. Or, after how many seconds to convert the data into something usable?

-So, saying "Set new course to...." would focus the course textbox and only allow certain inputs.
-Saying "Set new course for London.... Just kidding, set new course for 2-2-5" would work as the textbox only expects certain keypresses and a specific number of them.
-But what if you say "Set new course for 2-2...." now the game waits. But for what? It did expect you to say "0-2-2" or "2-2-...something" because it needs 3 items, right? But after about 1-2 seconds, the game stops waiting and decides that you meant to say "0-2-2" and completes the order.
-Set new course for 2-2 rudder 10 degrees. Here, the necessity of optional parameters is underlined. Even though we did not give a complete 0-2-2 order, by saying "rudder" we have switch to another optional parameter for that order, the turn radius. But the setting of the rudder is in fact the same as setting the ruder itself. So, this order is in fact the same as "Rudder 10 degrees, to course 2-2" or "Rudder 10 degrees to bearing 9-0".
-So saying Rudder 20 degrees is actually a "Set Course" command with other parameters turned off.

Another example... the sonar station. Let's call our sonar guy Hans...
- "Hans,," this puts focus on hans
- "Fire torpedoes...." comletely ignored since Hans can't do that.
- "Repeat last report", easy...
- "Report on closest...", now he waits. Such orders whould be progressive, like functions with optional arguments. Here, the devs must think of the possibilities. One of them is that you just want him to report the closest thing, either merchant or warship. So after 1-2 seconds the order is given as it is based on Hans->ReportOrder focus settings.
- "Report on closest merchant", easy, now Hans knows what you want from him imediately
-"Report on last contact", it begins the same way but now Hans updates his report on the last contact he was given or he reported.
-"Report on contact", another progressive order. This actually selects a bearing textbox that allows you to ask him about a precise contact, that you can view through the periscope for example.
-so as before "Report on contact at 2-2" means that after a few seconds he'll try to report the contact that is closest, in terms of bearing, to 022, within a certain limit, of course.

Since voice commands only mimic actual voice orders and already most orders are in fact progressive, I believe that this can easily be done. For example, when sending data to the TDC, you can either send one item of info (bearing for ex), two (bearing and AOB) and so on... The Send TO TDC button already acts as a progressive order. The basic vanilla version only needs such a structure to exist. After that, moders, or the casual user can customize every part of it. The actual part of voice recognition training and setting the keys would be done in an external program.