Well, you can!
I use a program that detects voice commands spoken through a microphone connected to your computer, for instance a mic on a headset.
This way I can say "Alice come here!" and my dog (Alice) will come running towards me.
Or I can say "Alice seek!" and she'll go sniff out the blood trails.
One command I use quite often is "Alice stay!" and she will stay while I move forward to scout for an animal or just to place a urine spray or do a call to lure in an animal and then fall back to get in a good position.
So how can you do this???
- Go to https://www.voiceattack.com/ and download the free version (this allows up to 20 commands)
- Then start a session in theHunter and go to options. Make sure you assign some keybinds to all the different commands for the dog, like "Sit", "Stay" etc. Remember your keybinds because you will assign those keys to the different voice commands.
- After installing Voice Attack you need to set up a profile. You can find the How-To in this guide https://www.voiceattack.com/VoiceAttackHelp.pdf
1. Click on this to create a new profile from the pulldown menu. Call it something like 'theHunter'.
2. Then you click on New Command to create a new command.
3. Next you type in the words you need to speak for the command to activate. I prefer my commands to start with the name of the dog and then the command so that it doesn't accidentally trigger when not intended to. For example, if you only put in "stay" as a command word then you might use "stay" while talking to someone either in voice chats or someone in the room with you and it will trigger the command.
4. After you entered the words you want to speak to trigger a command you want to add the correct keybind that you have for that command (this is where your in-game commands come into play). If you made a command for Sit then simply click the "Key Press" button in Voice Attack and then press the button you assigned to Sit for your dog.
Here are the default keybinds for the dogs as listed on the Wiki page (note, the give treats one is not shown in this table for some reason)
Now, whenever you speak the words you entered under "Whenever I say" then voice attack will detected it and then it executes the keypress you assigned to the command.
Here is an example of a command you can put in (note that the quotation marks should always be omitted when you type it into a command.
To make your dog sit, simply put in:
"Sit down!"
If you want to include your dogs name you can do so as well (my scent dog is Alice) and to include that in the command I would use:
"Alice sit down"
If you want to make it optional to say the dogs name you can go a bit more advanced by doing this:
"[Alice;] sit down"
The brackets [ ] means you can use any word inside the bracket.
The Semicolon is a separator that separates each of the words you want to use and by leaving it blank after Alice; it means I can either say Alice OR I can say <blank>, meaning nothing. That way the command allows you to either say "Alice sit down" or just "Sit down".
If you want to go even more advanced, lets say you have multiple dogs (like a Retriever and also a Scent dog and both have different names) like I do and you want just a single Sit command you can use for both dogs. My scent dog is Alice and my retriever is Leeloo, so then I would create the following:
"[Alice; Leeloo] sit down"
Now I can say either "Alice sit down" or "Leeloo sit down" and the command will press/execute the button I assigned to "Sit" for the dog in theHunter. Note that in this example I have no semicolon ; after Leeloo which means there is no option to leave it blank and say only "Sit down". In this example I MUST say EITHER Alice OR Leeloo first. If I don't say Alice OR Leeloo but just "Sit down" it will not work.
To make it work so you can use any of the dog names, but also not say their names you want this command line:
"[Alice; Leeloo;] sit down"
Now I can say either "Alice sit down", "Leeloo sit down" or just "Sit down" since there is a blank after the last semicolon.
The commands I use (note that I have no semicolons on the end since I want to avoid accidentally making the dog stay just because I mention the word "stay" or the program detects a word I say that is similar to stay (voice detection isn't perfect). Also note, I don't have a separate command for the "Give treats", but you can easily add that as well and simply say "Alice good girl" or any other command you want!
"[Alice; Leeloo] sit down"
"[Alice; Leeloo] stay"
"[Alice; Leeloo] lie down"
"[Alice; Leeloo] come here"
"[Alice; Leeloo] [get in; get out]"
"[Alice; Leeloo] [seek; go fetch]"
Note that the extra bracket, for example "[Alice; Leeloo] [get in; get out]" means that the words in the second bracket can also both be used. So in this example I can say:
"Alice get in"
"Alice get out"
"Leeloo get in"
"Leeloo get out"
And any of those combinations will trigger the command to make your dog enter/exit the ground blind. The same method is used for the Seek and Go Fetch commands since there is just one keybind for making the dog go sniff the bloodtrail OR go retrieve a harvest.
If you want to be picky though this means you can do silly things like... if Alice is already inside the blind I could say "Alice get in" and she would jump out!! This is because the keybind for Get in/out is the same one, and when combined in a command like this you can say either one of the commands and both execute the same keypress. But for all intents and purposes it makes more sense to tell your dog to get out if it is already inside the blind.
Feel free to ask any questions regarding VoiceAttack. I've used it quite a bit both in this game, as well as some other simulator style games like Flight Sim X, P3D and Elite Dangerous.
Hope this will be useful for you and you will enjoy talking to your dog instead of just pressing buttons!
