Make sure you have installed Microsoft's .NET Framework.

Training

High quality headset microphone / low background noise environment.

Modify speech recognition settings from the Speech->Recognizer->Settings menu.

There are some programs that require keys to be pressed for a while for them to produce an effect. The default delay that Shoot inserts before releasing the keys may not be long enough for the the program to recognize the key. To get around this problem, specify a longer delay for keystrokes. You may also need to specify a pause between each keystroke, through the pause attribute.

Both Shoot and Roger Wilco, as well as other voice chat programs, need to access the audio input device (microphone) to operate. Some older sound drivers don't allow simultaneous by more than one program, though. In general, you should be able to get around this limitation by configuring both programs to only use audio input when a key or joystick button is pressed (e.g, Shoot's push-to-talk in "hold to enable" mode). Of course, the voice chat program must also have a similar PTT feature for this solution to work.

Unfortunately, although RW has a PTT mode, it does not behave "nicely" and does not relinquish control of the microphone when voice is not being transmitted. Upgrading your sound drivers to the latest version might help solve the problem.

Some old sound cards or sound card drivers require sound playback and capture to use the same sampling rate. If Shoot is loaded before the game, it will open the input device with a preset sampling rate. If the game doesn't support that sampling rate it will probably not start or sound will be disabled.

To work around this problem, you should start the game first, switch back to the desktop (ALT-TAB), run Shoot and load the profile. Shoot will adapt to whatever sampling rate the game is using.

Note: if the program plays very low-quality sound (less that 16khz), Shoot may be forced to adapt to its sampling rate, at the expense of recognition accuracy.

Make sure your profile starts with the line:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

This is most likely caused by Shoot picking up background sounds and interpreting them as voice commands. Using a headset microphone might help reduce background noise. You can also configure Shoot to use "push to talk" and enable speech recognition only when you're ready to give a voice command.

Note: Some people have reported seeing this problem even if Shoot is not listening for commands. Although we don't know the cause of this problem, we tracked it down to some conflict between Shoot and ICQ, possibly, to ICQ's keyboard shortcuts. You may want to try disabling ICQ keyboard shortcuts and, if that doesn't fix it, disabling ICQ altogether while using Shoot. If you're seeing this problem but you don't use ICQ, I'd be interested to know about it.

You'll need to change the default microphone input for speech recognition. Follow these steps (thanks to Jeff Owens):

1. Go to the Control Panel->Speech.
2. Select the "Speech Recognition" tab.
3. Click the "Audio Input" button below the mic level bar.
4. An "Audio Input Settings" dialog will open where you should choose your preferred device (rather than the default).
5. Click on the Properties button.
6. An "Advanced Audio Properties" dialog will open where you should select the Mic/2 input.
7. Click Ok to close all windows.

Shoot is probably fighting with the game for access to the sound card. This is typically due to the programs trying to initialize the sound card (whether for input or output) with different sampling rates. Some reasons for this could be:

1. Your sound card or drivers are too old.
2. You're running Win98/ME.

Things you can try:

1. Try running Shoot *after* launching the game. This will force Shoot to adapt to the sampling rate set by the game.
2. Force Shoot to use a specific sampling rate. You'll need to match the sampling rate used by the game (you'll need to find it by trial and error). See the var sc_project=1228481; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_partition=7; var sc_security="e03fdd97";