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Using Voice Commands
Overview and Getting Started
Select Enabled Play controllers include on-board microphones that you can use to send spoken commands. This lets you say any of the commands included in your profile at any time and see the key/button pressed or your macro run.
To get started, use a profile with any spoken commands (each default profile starts with at least one spoken command for the different keys/buttons), make sure your device is either connected via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, then from your controller’s page, tap the “Start Listening” button.
You can now tap the “Stop Listening” button or unplug your controller if you want it to stop listening.
Once you’ve tapped start listening, your device will start the process of enabling the on-board microphones and start listening and processing all your speech while looking for words that match any of your commands in your profile.
Although your controller is processing all speech while it is listening, your audio never leaves your controller or sent to any third parties (or even sent to any other Enabled Play servers). This means you can use your device’s speech command capabilities with complete privacy as well as when not connected to the internet!
Chaining Spoken Commands
The controller is constantly processing your speech and waiting to hear one of your profile’s commands to trigger the button press or macro. This recognition processing happens very quickly and does not require you to pause before saying the command. This means two things:
1. It processes very quickly once it starts to recognize a command (under 100 milliseconds on average, and under 10ms in some cases!)
2. It will process commands it recognizes in the middle of a sentence.
This means if you had the command of “three” in your profile and said “those three guys over there at three three three west main street are over thirty three years old”, it will process your “three” command FIVE times! If you had any of those other words as commands, it would process them in the sentence as well. When it processes the commands, it will process them one at a time as you’re saying it. So saying the same command over and over again at a faster pace does not guarantee that it will execute the commands at the same rate that you say them.
Adding Spoken Commands to Profiles
You can add any spoken commands to your profile by using the command builder or by adding them to keys/buttons or macros.
- Simply select that you want to add a spoken command
- Then type what you want to say as the spoken command
You can also add alternative variations of what you want to say in order to help the controller recognize more phrases. These can either be entirely different sounding commands, or other words that sound like your main command.
You can also use voice commands alongside dictation mode in each profile. Learn more about dictation mode here: Using Dictation Mode
Voice Settings
There are 2 primary settings you can change for how you use voice commands on your Enabled Play Controllers:
- Voice Command Sensitivity
- Automatically Start Voice
Voice Command Sensitivity
There are 2 types of voice command sensitivities for your Enabled Play Controllers – Standard and Optimistic. You can switch between these two settings by flipping the “Use optimistic voice commands” setting on or off.
With Optimistic Mode on, your voice commands will fire faster and more often even if you aren’t saying the exact word or phrase of your command. This setting is extremely useful for people who want to use voice commands but have an irregular speech pattern or do not want to use dictation.
With Optimistic Mode off, your voice commands will still fire quickly, but you may need to add more specific voice commands or do tuning within your profile if you have an irregular speech pattern. This setting is best used when you want to use voice commands and dictation at the same time or are in an area with other people talking.
Automatically Start Voice
This setting allows you to control whether you want voice commands to automatically start when you plug in your Enabled Play Controller or launch the Enabled Play desktop app with a virtual controller. With this setting turned ON, you don’t have to tap the “Start listening” button. With it off, you can choose when to use voice commands.
Using Your Own Custom USB Microphones
If you are using an Enabled Play Controller with built-in microphones but want to use your own microphone that works best for you instead, you can choose which one to use when you plug in your controller. To use the built-in microphones on the Enabled Play Controller, simply plug in the controller with no other microphone plugged in.
If you want to use your own microphone, plug your microphone into any of the USB ports on the front of the Enabled Play Controller, then plug your Enabled Play Controller in. As long as your microphone is a standard USB microphone, your controller will use that microphone instead. If your custom microphone is not working, make sure your controller is getting enough power through the USB port from your computer, plug your computer in if it is a laptop, and then plug your microphone and Enabled Play Controller back in. If you still aren’t having success, let us know what microphone you are using by posting in one of the community channels at community.enabledplay.com
Best Practices and Tips
Spoken commands are extremely flexible and powerful when combined with other inputs since it doesn’t take any work from your head or hands to use! Here are some of our favorite tips when setting up and using spoken commands.
- Choose words that are distinct from each other in pronunciation when using commands that you will say often
- Choose short words for common commands that you need to use fast! Especially in gaming
- Speech is a great tool for secondary actions or offsetting doing multiple primary actions at the same time in gaming like blocking, accessing menus, aiming, throwing items, using quickbar items, and more!
- Avoid words that are only 2 characters long. For example “it” and “at” sound very similar and can easily get mixed up during processing. They only become highly viable if you use all of them for the same single command rather than competing commands.
- It can take up to 25 seconds from when you tap “start listening” to when the controller starts processing your speech
- The controller will try to isolate your voice from others in a room, but it can be challenging to do if others are talking at the same tone and distance from the controller, so if you’re going to be in a group, spoken commands might be less useful compared to other input types like hotkeys and expressions
- If you tell your device to start listening and it becomes disconnected from both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth it WILL keep listening and processing. If you want to stop it from listening, get it reconnected to your phone or tablet, or simply unplug the controller and plug it back in.
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