Chatting in UT means standing still with both hands off the controls. HFChat
lets you hold the fight and say it instead: press a key, speak, and the message
goes to chat.
It is client side only. Nothing is replicated, nothing is drawn over the game,
no engine object is replaced - the mod sends exactly what a player typing on a
keyboard sends, so it works in any gametype and on any server, ACE-protected
ones included.
How it works
- Speech recognition runs on your own machine (Whisper). Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
- Press your key and talk. What has been recognised so far appears on screen as HFChat: ...
- Finish with the word "over" and it is sent. Say it again if it did not catch, or press the key once more to throw the whole thing away.
- Two separate keys: one for public chat, one for team chat. Pressing the other one mid-sentence switches where the message goes without starting over.
- Unpack the archive into your Unreal Tournament folder. You get System\HFChat.u, a HFChat folder, and two shortcuts in the root.
- Run Start Speech. First launch downloads the recognition model (~1.5 GB), once only.
- In UT, tick Mod -> Hands Free Chat. You get a message and a sound confirming it.
- Bind the keys. The recogniser can write them for you, or do it yourself - see below.
Keys
Two plain console commands, so they go on any key you like:
Code: Select all
// public chat
set HFChatKey Trigger SAY
// team chat
set HFChatKey Trigger TEAMSAY
Advanced -> Raw Key Bindings and put the command on the key you want. There is
no menu path to that screen, the console command is the way in. Suggested
defaults are numpad + and numpad -.
What you need
- Windows, and OldUnreal patch 469e+.
- An NVIDIA card is strongly recommended - the bundled recogniser is built against CUDA. It falls back to CPU on anything else and still works, just slowly.
- About 300 MB of disk once the model is downloaded.
- No server-side install. Nothing to ask an admin for.
- The recogniser keeps the last 30 seconds of what you said. It is a chat mod - say a sentence, say "over", send. A bar shows how full the window is.
- Model size is the dial worth learning. Small models are fast and dirty, big ones slower and cleaner - but the very largest start hallucinating words nobody said. medium is the sweet spot and the default.
- The marker word, the keys, the model and the interface language are all configurable.
- Output language is English - that is what this is built and tested for. A hundred other languages are selectable and may well work, but that part is an experiment, not a supported feature.
- The window doubles as a plain dictation pad if you just want to talk text into your clipboard.
moddb: https://www.moddb.com/mods/hands-free-chat-hfchat Feedback and bug reports welcome. If something misbehaves, HFChat\hfchat.log
is written fresh on every run and usually says why.
Auto merged new post submitted 16 hours 22 minutes later
v1.1
- Fixed shipped python.
- Preview colour is configurable.
- Team chat and public chat differ by colour.
- Preview font size is configurable.
- Preview position on screen is configurable.
You need download it, instead of v1.0, since v1.0 broken and not work.
Link in first post.
