Voice Control

Voice control can be performed in English only. An English voice recognition engine may not be available in non-English operating system editions.

When you conduct site surveys, it is often convenient to control the application without using your hands. With TamoGraph, this can be achieved by using the operating system’s voice recognition engine. You can actually “tell” the application what to do using simple voice commands; for example, “TamoGraph, pause” or “TamoGraph, pan left”. To configure voice control, click Settings => Camera and Voice Settings in TamoGraph and select the Voice Commands tab. Check the Enable voice recognition box to turn on this functionality and select a Voice input device, which might be a microphone integrated into your laptop/tablet; or, better yet, headphones with a microphone; an external microphone typically provides a much higher voice recognition quality. On Windows, the Voice recognition engine control allows you to select a language to be used, e.g. “English – US” or “English – UK”. On macOS, you may need to enable enhanced (offline) dictation. To enable it, open the system preferences dialog, select “Keyboard”, then “Dictation”, turn on “Dictation”, enable the “Use Enhanced Dictation” feature, and restart TamoGraph.

After configuring the voice recognition parameters, use the Voice command test frame to test it. Press Start and say one of the pre-set commands:

  • Zoom in, Zoom out – zooms a floor plan in and out.
  • Start – starts a survey.
  • Stop – stops a survey.
  • Pause – pauses a started survey.
  • Resume – resumes a paused survey.
  • Pan up, Pan down, Pan left, Pan right – pans a floor plan.
  • Take photo – takes a photo.
  • Don’t listen – turns off voice recognition.

Each command must be prefixed with the specified Command prefix. By default, the prefix is “TamoGraph”, but you can change it to any other word. The reason why you need to use a prefix is the following: When voice recognition is enabled, the application is constantly listening for speech in the microphone. If you talk to someone while you are surveying and say, for example, “I need to take a photo”, the voice recognition engine hears the “take a photo” part and performs the action associated with this command, although you never wanted it to. To prevent the actions from being triggered by such phrases, actual commands intended for execution should be prefixed by a special word (by default, “TamoGraph”).

To test voice recognition, say “TamoGraph, zoom in” or “TamoGraph, take photo”. If the pronounced command is recognized, you will see and hear the confirmation message; e.g., “Zoom in ok”. For some of the commands, you can customize the associated action. Zoom step and Pan step control the percentage of zoom and pan, respectively. Take photo after (sec.) controls the time interval after which the photo is automatically taken.

Once you have configured and tested voice recognition, you can close the configuration dialog and use voice commands to control TamoGraph. If a command is not applicable now; e.g., pausing a survey that was never started, you will be notified accordingly. Voice recognition can be turned on and off using the microphone icon on the right side of the status bar of the main TamoGraph window.