Just an FYI for the community, and a query to anyone if there is a workaround that I am not able to find.

I bought VoiceBot yesterday on steam, and was looking forward to using it, as I have used voice assist programs before, starting with Game Commander almost 20 years ago.

I have been experiencing the strangest problems, starting with Voicebot taking 5+ minutes to load the Options menu, with the messages in the highest level of logging stating that "A task could not complete because the Speech Recognizer engine had timed out." which should have nothing to do with the Options menu?

In addition, VoiceBot would highlight commands spoken to it when it was the active window, yet would stubbornly refuse to do anything when another program was being run, including acknowledging that it "heard" the command.

I did a lot of troubleshooting, and the fix I eventually got to was to uninstall the Nahimic driver from MSI, version 6.0.1.8279. On the basic/included windows audio drivers, VoiceBot works perfectly.

I searched the discussions back for a few pages, and did not see anything about the Nahimic chipset & drivers not working with VoiceBot. Is there a workaround besides uninstalling Nahimic?

V/R

I reinstalled the MSI bundle with the Realktek driver and Nahimic 2.5.18, and updated Nahimic to the latest directly from the company itself, 2.5.23. The update did not resolve the problem, still the same behavior with the timeout. The Nahimic driver has nothing specific to speech recognition in the Microphone tab. That tab contains Voice Shaper with treble and bass boosts, a Voice Leveler, and Noise Suppression.

However, I tried an experiment, and it definitely is the culprit. I stop the Nahimic process from the start bar status icons, and use task manager to stop anything with "Nahimic" in it, and then VoiceBot starts working again without a problem until I reboot.

It seems that as soon as the Nahimic process is stopped, VoiceBot can "hear" commands again. What might explain this behavior, from what little I know about the Microsoft Speech Engine, is that the Nahimic driver changes the default input stream from SetInputToDefaultAudioDevice() to another valid input pipe for the Speech Engine, like SetInputToWaveStream(), that VoiceBot is not expecting or listening to?

Now that I know what this is, I can work around it. Cheers, and thanks for making VoiceBot!