Fun uses for voice recognition

Hey there!

First off all I would like to thank all the people responsible for WSR and WSR Macros. I am not sure if the forum moderators here are the same guys (propably not), but none the less I would like to also thank the moderators and contributors to these forums. The programs are giving me loads of enjoyment and without the threads on these forums, I would have had a much harder time through the first stages of getting to know WSR. Hopefully I can pay back some how through also contributing to the forums and maybe helping someone in need of (still pretty basic) assistance in commands and macros.

Anyway, as a short introduction I can say that I am UAS student from Finland and have always been curious by nature and into computers and such. If I happen to make mistakes in my spelling, I will just blame the fact that English isn't antywhere near my native language ;) As computers seem to have some effect on how WSR works, this might be as good a place as any to tell about my hardware. And no, not that hardware. At the moment I use a Intel I7 (@ 4.2ghz), ATI Radeon 4890, 6gb of DDR3 RAM at about 1333hrz, Windows 7 Ultimate (64 bit) and whatnot. As I understand, especially the windows version and RAM amount matters when using WSR, so it is good to mention. Anyway, I started using WSR about a week ago from frustration towards how slow and troublesome some actions were in Windows. I soon got the basics down and noticed them to be quite limited. I searched WSR Macros and "voila"! After learning how to write simple commands by hand ad understanding written macros, it really opened my eyes on the possibilities voice commands could have. So I tested them...a lot :D

Now I combine mouse/keyboard and voice control into a rather effortless and fast effect. Makes one wonder why I didn't try this earlier :) Anyway, as practice I have ended up creating voice commands for most of my audio and video needs. I still am not that fluent at dictating text especially into MSN Messenger, but that is not really an issue, as most of my conversations are in finnish anyway. Good luck turning that into text, WSR! All those programs are fun and all, but where I noticed voice commands to really shine are computer games. Examples follow :P

At the moment I play World of Tanks. For those who are not familiar with the game, here is a short description. It is a massively multiplayer online game where players drive around and fight in WW1-WW2 tanks in a semi-realistic setting. Each player drives one tank at a time. What I found out was that voice commands can transform a fun game to a still much better experience. The heightened interactiveness of yelling "Heavy explosive rounds, right now!" to your crewmembers rather than just pressing the corresponding button was amazing! I also switched almost a dozen other commands into voice commands. "Full speed ahead!","Capture their base!", "Need help!" are some examples which could be rather easily done by using a combination of sendKeys, text commands and emulating mouse movements. I am very excited about it and do not even try to hide it. Other games like Battlefield 3 can really benefit from commands like "Medic!", "Fire in the hole!" etc etc. Playing Skyrim and firing off spells feels much nicer with voice commands as well. Bending the laws of physics to your will by yelling "Fireball, chain lightning!" to fry the opposition is endlessly more fun than just pressing a button. I am sure you guys get the idea :) Oh and yes, I am well aware how nerdy it is, but who cares :D It is fun, and that is most important.

To not frantically go on and on about it, I want to end the post in a few questions. What are your experiences of using voice recognition programs for gaming purposes? What about other fun/less serious applications for the voice recognition use? I hope to spark some discussion on this topic, maybe share macro code to aid others and most of all help others to come up with fun ways to use this great program.

Edited by Masterofmayhem - 17/Dec/2011 at 12:57pm