Very Quick Recap.
Plan A - Brought a 7 input voice ardunio card & stuggled to sail to boats due to unrealbility and time delays. It was not going to work !
Plan B - Created a cell phone app in MIT AI2 inventor, it worked well, but it was slow to send requests to the boats due to it still working on line to overseas servers and the voice recognition being done on the other side of the world before coming back to the transmitter ..
So here we are Plan C. Cell Phone App. Blue Tooth low Energy (BLE), and the phone has Google Offline Speech to Text working offline from the internet.
The last few weeks I have been struggling, first with BLE. (break threw Saturday last week) I changed from Blue tooth to BLE to future proof this for the future phones is BLE protocols but its a lot more difficult to use.
The big ticket item of the project was now an android Samsung unlocked mobile phone. The fastest, latest and greatest phone costs $2000. Smartphones For Sale Online in NZ - Noel Leeming . I have a 2nd hand phone, but it is smaller and is always going to be slower as memory fully of old applications and battery life well used. Lucky for us phones models that are a couple of years still have another year of software updates and just about have the same processing speed as the latest and greatest but are way cheaper :) The phone market depreciates fast. I decided anything from an A10 onwards would be a great buy (Looks like Android 5,5 & 6 onwards is where speech recognition really got going) so I picked the samsung-galaxy-a13 as big screen, fast, on special at the right price, and had all the feature's I needed. As this phone is unlikely to ever make a phone call. The 5g network connections were irrelevant in my decision at this stage.
And the finial break, through last night when I got Google Offline Speech to Text to finally work after a week of trying. Failure after Failure and I was struggling to find the answer on the internet. (see at bottom for the finial writeup that helped, thanks someone!)
Spoiler Alert. One week of struggling to find out you must put all your Keyboard languages must be English (US) or English (UK) to work. (if you have keyboard set to English (nz) or English (Aus) you are unlikely to get google offline speech to work, it only works on a selected list of languages but try and find that bit of news on the internet...)
So I am ready for test sail three at Waihi. The weather forecast looks bad, but fingers crossed for a fine window in Waihi. I am still worried about the inference speed from voice command to boat action however it is now 10 times quicker than it was. Testing tomorrow will tell me if I am in the ball park and where to next ?
So where to from here? The wrong words still come up on google speech unit. More so on this off line software. the online was pretty accurate every time with the increase processing power.. But as this happens each time on the phone, I update the program to convert the wrong received word and change it to what we want. At the moment I have tuned up the boat on the transmitter software. Evenly I would like the transmitter to be set to full limits and the limited values sent from the phone is where we can tune the end points. And finial get some printed circuit boards designed and made to replace my home made circuit boards stuck in the box on the back of the transmitter and resign how we mount them on / in the transmitter. (maybe another 3d printer project coming for the entire new transmitter case ??? :) Then there is the building of a new J Class hull before Sumer too, Busy days ahead. Happy Toy Boat Sailing Everyone. <tgarsc@gmail.com>
Here's the secret Sause to get Google Voice to Text Working Off-Line, thank you to the people who posted this.....
"Thanks for giving this a try @New-To-Sam-sung . I have had a look at this and found the following steps to get this sorted:
1) Head into Settings > General management > Language and input > On-screen keyboard > Manage keyboards. Disable all except Google voice typing.
2) Again go to Settings > General management > Language and input > Default Keyboard. Make sure Samsung Keyboard is selected.
3) If Speech-To-Text still does not work OFFLINE, you can try going to Settings > General management > Language and input > On-screen keyboard > Manage keyboards > Google Voice Typing > Offline speech recognition. Uninstalled and then reinstalled the English (US) language."