Voice control doesn't work

#1

I notice in the settings that it is mentioned on windows 10 you can use voice to input lengths
but it doesnt work, or is not documented how to get it working

the way i imagine it working is. Lets say i want to draw a rectangle

i click to start. I would love to be able to say
“3 inches by 1.5 inches” or “3 inches by 4 and a half inches” and the rectangle would automatically change to that size without me having to use the calculator tool or menu.
at this point it would just be a matter of pulling the trigger to confirm the size.

By the way i’m using a quest via the app, and i’ve also used it with oculus Link

#2

I know it works well enough but not perfectly with my Rift S.

#3

Hmm… Is there something special you have to do?

In the settings it says to say something and i should hear it replay and I do.

Also is the behavior of this feature as I am imagining?

#4

It should work but only with Oculus Link, not with the standalone app.

Yes, it works exactly like you’re imagining it :slight_smile: Well almost. The “and a half” part is not recognized. It’s simple to add support, but it needs to be done explicitly. Do you often say “3 inches and a half”, or “3 and a half inches”? Or both? Should we recognize also “half an inch”? Should we recognize “a quarter” too? At the moment we recognize more formally spoken, metric-system-friendly numbers like “three dot five inches”.

#5

I depends on if i’m dealing with fractions or not. I don’t always want to do the math. 7/16 is easier to write instead of whatever that is in decimals. (see i’m even too lazy to pull the calculator out for this post)

if usually work with wood and imperial measurements
5/64 = “Five Sixty Forths”
“7/16” = “Seven sixteenth’s”

0.25 = “a quarter inch”
0.75 = “Three quarter inches”
7.75 = “Seven and three quarter inches” or “Seven point seven five inches”

the decimals are easy because its basically just reading the numbers with the word point in the middle to represent the decimal

fractions aren’t much harder but requires move phrases to account for all of the combinations.

#6

OK, I’ll do that. Note that I don’t know how much confusion there might be between similar-sounding “Two Hundred Sixty Forth” and “Two Hundred Sixty Forths”.

Unless I’m mistaken (I’m not a native English speaker), there are even completely ambiguous forms like “A Hundred Twenty Eighths” (100/28 or 120/8?). I think we can avoid that by allowing only powers of two in the denominator, and let’s say up to 1/64th. That leaves us with these three new rules:

  • (non-null-integer or “a”) (“half/halves” or “quarter/quarters” or “eighth/eighths” or “sixteenth/sixteenths” or “thirty-second/thirty-seconds” or “sixty-fourth/sixty-fourths”) (unit)

  • (non-null-integer) “and” (same as the previous rule)

  • special cases just for “half an inch” or “half a feet”

Am I missing some cases?

#7

Maybe it would be good to recognize the general for “x and y over z”
four and three over two
one hundred and seventy two and thirteen over forty two

#8

At this point I’m interested in how people might naturally express themselves and support that. I don’t want to add too many variants because we might end up loosing precision: if we support too many variants, then it becomes easier for the voice recognizer to confuse what you said with a close-sounding but very different meaning. We’re working with imperfect technology here—just like hand-tracking on Oculus Quest.

Did you know that you can already express any fraction like 12/43? Say “12 meters (pause here) divided by 43”, in two steps. It’s implemented mostly because it’s just how it works in the calculator interface, and the words “divided by” at the start of a sentence are clearly distinct from anything else. But it’s unclear it is useful, let alone ever discovered by anyone.

Similarly, it’s quite possible that the word “over” might be distinct enough from the rest to be easily recognized without precision loss. I’d still have some concrete feedback from someone that it would really be helpful, though.

On the negative side, note that there are ambiguities: “one hundred and two over three” = 102/3 or 100+2/3?

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#9

i see what your saying. Its like your telling someone what keys to type on the calculator. This is fine but i think its not documented.

#10

Yes. Thanks, I’ll document in detail what is recognized. The voice recognizer started as an experiment, around three years ago, when there were still more machines with Windows 8.x than now (it only works on Windows 10). We played with other systems too. But now there is no reason not to make “official” what we have at this point.

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#11

Done, will be part of the next release.

@Christopher_Overbeck: I also added over as you suggested. Any ambiguity with over is already present with other fractions, anyway; I chose to have over and other fractions bind more strictly than and, so “one hundred and three quarter inches” (or “one hundred and three over four inches”) gives 100+3/4.

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