Voice Recogniton and RailMaster confused that my Elite is an eLink

[mal]

Hi All As my layout is in my garage I do not use my computer during the colder months but have just set it up again. I have two issues:

On loading RailMaster it says my settings say Elite (which is correct) but identifies that I am using eLink. All appears to load correctly and work but dont remember this happening last year.

The second is in relation to speech recognition Last year it worked a treat and I reckon it was nearly 90% responsive. This year I get an odd response with an engine appearing not always the one I asked for but will not respond to any other command. The headset and microphone settings are all correct and the windows speech recognition window is responding to my voice. I have redone the speech tutorial but it has not made any difference. I am so disappointed that I have gone from one end of the spectrum down to the other. Could it be because it thinks I have an eLink ?

Any assistance as ever would be welcomed

thanks Malcolm

[96RAF]

Earlier in the year I had problems in that RM kept thinking I had two elinks when in fact I have an Elite and an eLink as controllers A and B.

I spent a lot of time trying to sort it, going through the ini file, device manager and RM settings before I spotted that the Elite I was using had been flagged as having comms problems with RM - although it worked fine stand alone.

After invoking HRMS to look into the problem I shame faced spotted a label I had put on the Elite box many moons ago saying it had duff comms with RM. Swapping the Elite for a known good one immediately fixed the problem. RM saw an Elite and an eLink.

I suggest your Elite USB comms may be awry.

As a start try a unit reset from the Elite menus to see if that fixes it.

[mal]

Thanks for that. I will do a reset. It is the same one I used last year but technology does tend to have a mind of its own. I found an old post from last year when I initially had a problem and that advised not loading RM for about 10 minutes to allow for all windows files to be loaded. It worked after that last year but alas not tonight. The first engine requested came up but then nothing else. I then started to get all types of weird words in the speech recognition window not related to what I was saying. Try again tomorrow and will do that reset. I will also try another port perhaps. Malcolm

[96RAF]

If changing ports don’t forget to adjust your RM settings to match Dev Mgr.

[westernwill]

There is always the possibility that your USB cable is playing up.

[Chrissaf]

Mod comment: 'Malcolmd' raised a secondary thread to post the comment reproduced below. It makes more sense to keep it in this thread as it is basically a continuation of the same issue.

Thanks everyone I did an Elite reset and changed port (did change in settings thanks) but no joy still saying eLink albeit it loads and the Elite seems to work great. Speech recognition still an issue and despite doing more tutorials and checking all settings etc I will say "Loco 20" and up pops loco 20 no problem and then that's it ... will not answer any other command until you close and reopen and then again just the first command. I will keep trying as I don't know what has changed since last year when it worked great, other than a software update. I have sent a request for help to RM.

Malcolmd

[mal]

Hi All What a difference a day makes (is that a song) Yesterday when I logged on railmaster recognised my elite as an elite and the same today. No idea why it has decided to drop the elink but delighted. Alas speech recognition did not work so today I went back to basics and started again including the tutorials. This time though I noted that when doing the tutorials each sentence seemed to be recognised without issue. I then opened up railmaster and speech recognition and called up a loco and up it came. (as it had done each time) but this time to my delighted the second and subsequent commands were recognised and it was responding like last year about 95% or so of the time. It is great to have it working I must admit. Whether or not not a file had got corrupted following one of the upgrades or not who knows. ~that is computers I suppose. Thanks again for all your help Malcolm

[Chrissaf]

Subject to the spec of the PC, Windows can sometimes get totally bogged down with hogged resources performing 'housekeeping' tasks including Windows Updates. If you have a traditional HDD [rather than a SSD] then it can be performing disk management optimisation tasks in the background. It has been noticed in the past that these can seriously hamper RailMaster voice control. Sometimes you just need to start up your PC half an hour or so before you want to use RM on it and just let those housekeeping tasks complete unhindered. This might be particularly relevant if you haven't used this PC for some time and powered it up. It could well have had a higher number of tasks queued up. Hence this could easily account for why a fresh start the next day gave a different experience.

[mal]

Thanks very much. Yes I learnt that from the Forum last year, I think from you, and although I have an ssd I do leave it as you suggest. Today I got the elink message back and voice recognition not working but for some reason it seems to be changing the microphone settings and when I changed them back (they should have been the default) all went very well indeed. I have to say once working it is impressive. I ignore the elink message as the elite seems to be working fine and obviously not effecting voice recognition. Computers???!! thanks again Malcolm