A bit of a make-or-break issue.

Unity Engine
1

Hey everyone,

I’ve been experimenting around with Unity for use in our upcoming game, There Came an Echo. TCAE is a bit of an oddity, being almost entirely voice controlled.

Mono currently supports Microsoft’s Speech Recognition libraries (http://go-mono.com/status/status.aspx?reference=4.0&profile=4.5&assembly=System.Speech), but I’m not entirely sure when they were added, and I’m thus not entirely sure Unity supports this library.

Despite all the wonderful ease-of-use features Unity gives, this is a non-starter…we literally can’t use Unity if we can’t get this library working somehow. Relevant questions:

  1. What are the odds of getting the latest version of Mono supported sometime in the next year?
  2. Is it possible to write plugins or something to get external libraries working? How difficult is it?

Thanks. I was really looking forward to using Unity, but…yeah. Gotta have it.

2

  1. What are the odds of getting the latest version of Mono supported sometime in the next year?
    That really depends on what you mean… I doubt we’ll do a proper mono sync in the next year, but we continuously take fixes and improvements.
    Have you tried copying the mono assemblies and their dependencies into a unity project? Just because it came with 4.5 doesn’t mean it require 4.5. Odds are it just works™.

  2. Is it possible to write plugins or something to get external libraries working? How difficult is it?
    Adding any mono/.NET assembly to your project is as easy as drag and drop.
    Adding native libraries require pro and is not supported on web platforms.

3

I managed to copy out the System.Speech assembly using a program called GACView. I imported the .dll into my assets folder, and the library is now apparently supported…

However, running the following extremely simple code straight-up crashes Unity.

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
using System.Speech.Recognition;

public class SpeechToText : MonoBehaviour {
	
	public SpeechRecognitionEngine speechEngine;
	
	// Use this for initialization
	void Start () {
		speechEngine = new SpeechRecognitionEngine();
	}
	
	// Update is called once per frame
	void Update () {
	}
}

So that’s not good. = P

4

I realized that maybe I had imported the standard Microsoft .NET System.Speech.dll, and not the Mono one? I installed Mono 2.10.9, but I have no idea where to grab the assemblies. (By which, do you mean .dll’s?)

5

Quick update…despite the documentation saying otherwise, System.Speech actually isn’t supported in even the most current version of Mono. So, uh…never mind, I guess.

6

Thanks for the update.

Depending on your platform you’ll have other alternatives with unity pro and native plug-ins, unless you’re on the web platforms where native support is considered unsafe and therefor not available. As soon as installers are required you’re generally capable of adding native code and thereby use whatever 3rd party libraries available to that platform.

Make sure to keep us posted. I’m sure a lot of people look forward to when System.Speech is added to the mono framework.