X-Copilot
This is a Python plugin for X-Plane to support voice commands in the simulator.
Installation
X-Copilot runs in python, so to be able to use it in X-Plane, you will need to have installed Python 2 in your system and Sandy Barbour's Python Interface plugin in x-plane.
Installing dependencies
With python installed on your system, execute the install.bat file. This will install all the python packages required by the speech recognition library.
Check dependencies required by speech_recognition project to support pyaudio. Install the required packages for your platform.
Windows users: make sure your python installation directory is on your PATH environment variable as well as the python/scripts directory. This should have be done automatically by the python installer. If not, try to reinstall python 2 and make sure to check the option to install python.exe in your PATH.
Mac users: you need to have already installed 'portaudio' package. If you have homebrew you can just do 'brew install portaudio'. You may need to execute the install.sh file with sudo privileges.
Quick verification
You can verify that all dependencies are installed and X-Copilot is working properly running the try-it.bat file in the console. Make sure your Microphone is plugged in and is working properly. When you run it, it will ask you for a command, then say:
"SET ATLIMETER TWO NINE NINE TWO"
The output should look like this:
$ Say a command...
$ Command recognized: SET_ALTIMETER:29.92
If the command is not recognized, the output should be:
Command not recognized:
Installing and setting up the X-Plane plugin
Finally, copy the PI_xcopilot file and xcopilot folder into the PythonScripts folder (<X-PLANE-INSTALLATION-DIR>\Resources\plugins\PythonScripts).
In X-Plane, go to Settings -> Buttons: Adv -> custom cmnds from plugins and assign a key / button for xcopilot/record_voice_command. Every time that you want to say a command to X-Copilot, just press this button once (no need to keep pressing it while recording) and say one of the supported commands. A window should popup in the sim notifying the current state of X-Copilot (Recoding, Command recognized or Command not recognized).
Technical / Dev notes
How does it work?
The process is quite simple:
- Transcribe voice commands to text using speech_recognition project.
- When the command is in a string format, it's parsed through a regular expression to identify and extract the data from the specified command
- Once the command is recognized, it's translated to data ref operations (setting / getting one or more data refs in x-plane)
Pocketsphinx configuration
Currently the language used by sphinx to recognize commands is specified in corpus.txt file.
To create the language model, go to: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/tools/lmtool-new.html, upload the corpus.txt and get the LM and DIC files content and replace the existing ones defined in pockectsphinx-data/xp-XP folder.
Test
$ python -m unittest discover
Package
$ python setup.py sdist