voice recognition is kind of neat

I know I'm late to the party, but I noticed a couple nights ago that UT2k4 has voice recognition for ordering the bots around.  I became further intrigued when I discovered that one of the commands would make a bot get out of a vehicle, which I desperately wanted since bots love to jump in a vehicle just as I'm getting near it.

Setting it up was slightly complex.  In Microsoft's infinite wisdom, the speech recognition engine for WinXP is only usually distributed through Office XP/whatnot.  There is, however, a free and legal way to get it.  Simply download their speech recognition SDK, and install it.  You'll then be able to train it up (it provides several things you can read to it when you have spare time, they only take about ten minutes) so it recognizes your voice, which is necessary for accuracy.

One issue I have is that it seems very adamant on turning off Mic Boost, which my mic needs so I'm audible.  I just have a fairly cheap Altec Lansing stereo headphone+microphone headset that I got at Best Buy several years ago so I could talk on TeamSpeak while playing Guild Wars.  I guess if I get a better headset I'll have to retrain.

It works fairly well in UT2k4 though.  I can now push to talk and order bots around.  Sometimes it takes a couple tries because the mic volume meter occasionally won't go above two or three blocks, and it won't recognize a damn thing I'm saying unless it goes all the way up to the red.  But in CTF I can tell the bots to cover me while I'm running a flag back and then tell them to go back to attacking when I get the capture, without having to navigate the speech menu and divide my attention.

Sadly this doesn't make the bots not suck at Onslaught.  If I try to run any sort of advanced strategy involving me going and tying up the enemy so that our team can get a few nodes uncontested, they'll still take forever to take power nodes on their own, even if I order them to attack.  It would be nice if I could say "Everyone take node 1" and have the bots all converge on node 1.

"Everyone suicide" at the beginning of a match is usually funny.