A Thorough Investigation

---

Published on 2020-11-11 00:00:00 +0000

Wit.AI and Last Weeks Issues

I tried to more thouroghly test to see why the problems from last week were arrising. First I turned the visibility of my app to private, in case that affects the voice-to-text stage.

• Giving move commands in the format “Move to " or "Send to " is generally transcribed correctly.
• Giving move commands in the format “Move and to " or "Send and to " are mostly right, but mess up more than with a single unit name.
• Giving move commands in the format “<unit_name(s)> move to " are terrible at being interpreted.

Since all my previous attack commands had been of the form “ attack ", the issue could be starting with the unit name. However, I am unsure of a different structure for attack commands (Maybe "Attack with <unit_name(s)>"?).

Web Captioner Research

I also spent some time looking into what Web Captioner uses as suggested by Prof. Austin Yarger. They use Web Speech API for their voice-to-text. However, it isn’t like a normal API. It is the type of API that is ONLY usable by browsers (and only certain ones at that), much like setTimeout, setInterval, etc. Therefore I don’t believe it is of any use to me, though in theory it could be used in a webgl build (not exactly sure how though).

Trial and Attack

Attack commands of the form “ attack " still are failing. Therefore I decided to test attack commands of the form "Attack with <unit_name(s)>". While this did work more often, it was still failing more often than the top two types of movement commands.

Next Steps

At this point I’m not sure what to do regarding voice commands. Should I stick with wit.ai despite the failings as there are no other free crossplatform voice-to-text systems? Should I switch it to use Windows speech which supposedly works better, but would limit the game to Windows only? As I struggled with this question, I continued to work on attack scripts which are independant of the voice system, as well as adjusting the forward of the name bubbles to be the camera position.

« Continued RTS Game Developement It's Coming Along »