Vox not working with the wife.....

[Spenner11]

  Okay so VC is working brilliant with myself, average 95% success rate, I have two speech profiles set up which VC can change between for myself and my wife, we have both done training on the separate profiles, which seems to have worked wonders for me, but not for my wife!

Has anyone else had this issue? Am I missing something?

Help please!

[nime5ter]

Unfortunately, there's not much we can guess based on just the fact that she's your wife.

If she has a strong non-native accent in English, that would be helpful for us to know, obviously.

Some things:

Review the trouble-shooting guide, particularly "user issues" since you say that it's working fine for you. http://voxcommando.com/forum/index.php?topic=1321.0

What kind of microphone setup do you have? Maybe the input level you're using works well for you but not for her? Have you tried recording her saying the commands to find out what your computer is picking up? Maybe experiment with that a bit.

Are you using prefixes at all? (If not, you could try it, at least for her profile.)

[nime5ter]

One other point: it's not clear whether you're implying that it doesn't understand her at all (generating VC.NotRecognized events, for example) or whether  it's generally recognizing the correct commands but at a much lower confidence than what you're getting. The latter is not necessarily a problem, as long as she has the required confidence levels set lower in Options.

[Soda97]

I too have the same problem.

I'm testing with all kinds of things.  One of them is making another set of speech commands that's easier for her to say and easier for Vox to pick up those saying.

[Haddood]

My girlfriend has a strong accent in her English as well, so it hard for Vc to understand her often. I believe things improved by asking her to dictate few word documents, the difference from profile training, it captures certain words that she pronounce way different from what is expected  ...

We noticed SP is better in recognizing her English, but SP has its limitations
Xbox understand her pretty well, I belive that is because Xbox always has a very limited number of words to understand at any given moment

If you have access  to kinect, try kinect recognition engine with VC SP, if it works for her, I think you can run 2 versions on one PC

[Spenner11]

Thanks for all the help guys!

Just to clear up a few points, we do use a prefix for VC, as a rule VC will pick up my wifes voice and what she is saying, just the confidence isn't high enough to trigger the command, although it's not uncommon for VC.Not Recognized to pop up once or twice whilst she is trying to give any command too!

I have tried fiddling with my mic input levels (I have one stand alone Blue Yeti Pro, with input set to around 10/100, with all 4 of the built in mic's active, it is placed about 6 inches behind myself and my wifes head, where it is attached to the back of our couch....

Prefix confidence is set to 60 and Command confidence level set to 50, although lowering these settings does seem to end up giving my wife better results, VC tends to pick up a lot of false positives from myself and my wife ( random commands even in prefix mode but)

Her accent isn't really all that bad, pretty standard BC Canadian accent with a touch of Scottish twang in there, If anything, I would think my voice (Broad British Yorkshire accent) would be harder for VC to understand!

Pretty frustrating because I want VC to work as amazingly with her as it does with me!

I plan on getting a Kinect to try out with VC next month, maybe even using VAC to use the existing mic I have and the Kinect at the same time( providing results are all good)
Will keep you all updated and currently tinkering with having 2 instances of VC running too.

Thanks guys

[Haddood]

I think your confidence levels are pretty low ... but if you are not having issues than what works do not touch... just thinking out loud, could it be the difference (as well the need for low confidence) is coming from volume issues? to check, use any recording software that draws the sound wave ... record yourself giving a command, and her giving the same command. then, compare the shape of the wave of her voice to yours, if is notably smaller then there might be volume issues. if so, 2 choices ...

• easy: change mic volume with the profile
• More complex: try stereo tools which will give lots of tools to improve the sound quality, levels, gating, EQ...etc. ... the cool thing is that it has built in web, that you can use to switch presets at the same time you switch profiles ..

[nime5ter]

Just one question:

Are you using en-GB as the Speech Recognizer Culture for both of you? If your wife has a fairly Canadian accent, she'll probably have better luck with en-US. At least, that's our experience. So, maybe having her own instance of VC installed is the best way to go for a number of reasons.

As the only woman on the forum that I know of, I'll just say that in general I find for me the input levels need to be higher than they do for James using my (lousy) built-in laptop mic, and it picks him up quite confidently from farther away than me.

However, with a proper, customized input level for my needs, I almost always get a confidence well over 90 on my machine unless I screw up a command.

Using the Amulet with our HTPC's configuration I generally don't have problems even though it uses a James-trained profile. I *do* have major problems with any open dictation commands on that machine, but other commands seem fine.

Sounds like you're already experimenting with the input, so hopefully you'll be able to find a balance that works for both of you. I, too, think it would be good for you to do some recordings to see what the machine is picking up.

If you figure out what works, please let us know!

[Spenner11]

Up until this morning I have been using en-GB, but have now just switched to US and retrained my profile (Still getting great results for myself)
Hopefully when my wife finishes work and has chance to retrain her profile it'll make some difference!

If not, I will definitely give recording ourselves a try and comparing the results!
One thing I've learnt from having and using VC is to be patient! What you're trying to achieve always works out in the end!

Thanks again for the advice everyone    

[jitterjames]

This reminds me of something else.  I don't know how to test this but I am fairly certain it is true:

If you are using VC (not the SP version which you can't train anyway) and you want to train a profile.  I think this really only works properly if the profile is trained using the same engine that you will be using in VC. 

-If you plan to use en-GB engine in VC, then you must train your profile in en-GB

-If you plan to use en-US engine in VC, then you must train your profile in en-US