Blog Post 3 – Current Progress Vr Project

i had a really discouraging first week of my group capstone, but it ended in success. that's also the reason why my blog post is being turned in late. i was so absorbed by what i was trying to do that i forgot we had to write blogs for the class. good thing we drop our 3 lowest posts!
our project is a virtual reality simulation, and my team decided on a simple language learning rpg-style game where you can learn basic words and phrases in spanish (for now). well, in order to make this as immersive as possible, we want users to be able to say the words and phrases instead of just having options float in front of you and you select the right one. 
my job is to integrate the speech recognition into unity so it can go into our game. i spent days going over our options for software that could potentially do the job. the recommended software for oculus was a software called wit.ai, but their documentation was not up-to-date, the software itself was a pain to get working, and when it did work, it didn't work well. 
the next option was google cloud's dialogflow, and i could not get it working at all. their documentation was much better than wit.ai, but either something was missing or i was copying the instructions poorly because i could not get it to even authenticate my credentials, and we just don't have time to play around with the basics of a program. 
the last option i tried was microsoft's recently updated speech services. the authentication was a breeze, but it did not have any guides for how to use it in a vr environment so i had to watch a bunch of unity videos to understand how to use it (never done game dev before yay). then once i knew how to do some basics, i messed around with the sample script microsoft gave to try and see if i could get voice recognition in a sample scene. i am not kidding when i say that i spent a whole day making a button in a vr scene that would work with a voice recognition script that would show the text of what i spoke into a microphone. at 10pm i finally succeeded. go me.
now that we know it's possible, i move on to making it work for what we need. i have to see if i can make certain phrases do things to the game, or set off another script i guess. i'm hoping that's not too hard. we will see.
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