Looking for Vent-to-text support

Mycroftxxx1 · 05-05-09, 04:24 PM

Hi All,

Slightly OT for an interface question so I thought it best fit here. We have a member of our guild who is deaf. In order to share our vent chatter as well as raiding talk, I have been looking around for some way to take our vent channel voice feed and run it into a voice recognition tool. We try to type out a lot of the raid stuff but the chatter is just too fast to keep up with.

Anyone ever run into something that could help make this happen? I have searched Vent's support site and found where they posted no plans to offer this support....

Thanks -- Mx

Vyper · 05-05-09, 11:51 PM

Sadly, this is unlikely to happen.
I'll cut to the chase first, and say it literally cannot be done with an addon, as addons cannot interact with anything outside WoW.

From there, it's unlikely that anyone will ever implement it for vent, since vent is closed-source. That kind of interaction would involve either reversing the vent protocol and designing your own client, or reversing the client itself and designing an interface.

Not only that, but you have to recognize that with the quality of the transmissions, the myriad of voices at once, and all the different voices it would have to pick out and understand, most modern speech recognition algorithms aren't going to have a chance of providing anything useful in terms of output. Of course, I'm hardly up on the latest research, so maybe I'm out of date.

For the short term, as far as I can tell (after only a small amount of research) you really don't have any options, other than to try to keep him up to date through the chat frame. In the longer term, if you can build enough interest in something like that for an open source platform (e.g. Mumble) it might happen, but the technical obstacles make it much less likely.

I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help, and I wish you the best of luck!

Mycroftxxx1 · 05-06-09, 05:10 AM

Thanks for teh reply. I realize this wouldn't be an addon but with all the gaming available, I only see a small portion of the world as only a WoW player.

Voice recog is daunting. I am an old-time IT person including product author on mainframes. I know difficult when I see it! ;-) I guess I was looking to see if anyone heard of a way to pipe vent output into something like Dragon Naturally or one of the other voice recognition products with any success.

Thanks for trying -- Mx

Taryble · 05-06-09, 12:25 PM

It would be possible to feed the sound from Ventrilo into a speech-to-text program via a "virtual output" method - similar to what i use to connect WinAmp to Vent.

I use a program called Virtual Audio Cable. Once installed, your system sees it as both an audio-out device and an audio-in device. Set the output on your Ventrilo to VAC, and the input on your speech-recognition program to VAC. Voila, Vent is feeding into your speech-recog.

However, it'll probably choke on the normal Ventrilo conversations, especially in a raid. At the very least, it'll lag behind.

Vyper · 05-06-09, 12:41 PM

I suppose you could try that, but I don't think it would work well. Having all those different voices talking over each other would be sure to confuse any Voice to Text program to pieces.

The way I would be inclined to approach the problem is use something Open Source (e.g. Mumble) and integrate with it to get the seperate audio streams before they are combined on the sound card, and feed that to a Voice-to-Text engine. Of course my approach involves programming knowledge and a-lot more time than yours ;-).

Mycroftxxx1 · 05-06-09, 05:26 PM

Thanks to both of you. I will ask my friend if she has a voice-recog package already and also how powerful her PC is. If she has 2 boxes, that may work even better!

Thanks -- Mx

Bluspacecow · 05-06-09, 08:36 PM

Maybe an addon like this might help :

http://www.wowinterface.com/download...62-ArtPad.html

It allows you to share a drawing pad between users of the addon in your raid.

Then you can draw something visually for her in case she misses raid chat.

BFSskepsis · 05-06-09, 09:17 PM

Or this!

http://www.wowinterface.com/download...BossNotes.html

Mycroftxxx1 · 05-07-09, 05:27 AM

For her, it's more the social interaction between the raiders rather than just instructions. Our chats tend to be very active with social chatter as we are a casual guild made up of a lot of family members and thiesr friends.

And, it makes shouting out alerts to raid members a bit slower since I type rather slow....

Either way -- I need to catch her next time she is on the guild forums to see what she may have already.

Thanks again all for your ideas -- Mx

ßlink · 05-07-09, 01:38 PM

i would suggest contacting Ventrillo on the deaf issue. maybe they can make a "deaf" mode that would translate it to text. then another developer can make a program that reads it. but it would be an extremly difficult task for ventrillo to make

Mycroftxxx1 · 05-07-09, 03:38 PM

Someone posted on Ventrilo's support forum looking for this. They came back pretty clearly that they would not ever offer anything to provide speech to text conversion. Actually, a codec was my first thought for supporting this but I need to factor in how involved voice recognition can be.

Thanks -- Mx