Problems with speech recognition/ Chrome/Windows

Hello, I've had Rocket Japanese for a week but am very frustrated that it sometimes doesn't seem to catch my spoken words. I'm currently using a Windows 11 Home version 22H2 desktop computer with Chrome Version 121.0.6167.185 (Official Build) (64-bit). It seems to work about 8 times out of ten.  I've tried two microphones and get the same issue.

When I play back what I've said it sounds perfectly clear however, here's what I often see. "Having problems? Report this phrase or contact us"  or for another phrase I get "No speech detected, check your mic settings or our FAQs." 

Any suggestions please? 

Not from Rocket Languages but those both look like current versions, so you are good there.

Any time I see that error, it is something on my side. Like if I think I am using my webcam microphone but I my headset microphone is actually the one selected, it will say it didn't hear anything.  

Also my webcam microphone does display that occasionally (even when it is the microphone selected) as it is a lower quality microphone.  With my headset microphone (a much better quality microphone) I almost never get that error, but I do once in a while (1-2 times per month maybe?).

I would also try a different USB port. Not likely to be useful, but easy to try. If you have a jack microphone (vs USB) and you have more than one record jack, might be worth trying that as well.

If nothing helps, I would reach out to them on the support page. This is the link for me:

https://app.rocketlanguages.com/members/contact-us

Then they will be able to work with you one on one.  Good luck!

Thanks Scott. I'm using a cheap Logitech microphone and experimenting with different distances from my mouth etc. I tried with my webcam and inbuilt microphone but that didn't work as well so it's not plugged in now. After some research on Amazon I bought a Jabra headset and although the audio was slightly better quality it wasn't comfortable and didn't resolve the issue so I sent it back. I've tried contacting support but haven't yet received a reply (I think they are a few days behind.) I'll try your suggestion of different USB sockets though I've no great expectation of success from that. I'll report back here if anything changes, meanwhile I'll just have to move forward with the dreaded phrase "No speech detected, check your mic settings or our FAQs." coming up every few phrases!

I occasionally have the same issue, using a logitech webcam mike.  Tried a headset and also returned it as I didn't see a big difference.  I just move on and come back to the phrase.  Annoying, but not the most frustrating issue in trying to learn a new language!

Thanks, good to know it's a common issue. I guess I'll do what you do ‘just move on’ and come back to it later. If Rocket tech support come back to make any more suggestions then I'll be sure to let you know here. 

Mine definitely got better with the headset but I bought a medium priced one (over $100, but I don't think much over) and the difference in audio quality between that and my webcam are striking. That said, it still doesn't sound exactly like I do and from my reading, if I wanted really good reproduction, I needed to really step up the quality. But definitely not required for Rocket Languages!

If it was just not transcribing what you are saying well, then I think the most common issue is you are not pronouncing the words well. They may sound good to your ear, but we all know a non-native speaker within one sentence and the computer can tell as well. 

But in this case, it was saying it wasn't getting any input at all, so that isn't the issue.

Sorry to hear support is lagging on their response. My experience has been to get an answer within 48 hours. Hopefully it is just a busy time for them (they did just have a sale).

Best of luck to all of you!

I am not sure if I am having the same problem. Is it supposed to be transcribing what I say? Everytime I record, it simply just lets me playback what I said. There's no indication of it transcribing and it doesn't give any feedback whether positive or negative. This makes me just not use the recording feature. This is certainly not a microphone issue, because even when I say “hola” , I dont see the word “hola” written when I can clearly hear my voice say it. Is it supposed to write out what you said? 

Ishan, I'm using Rocket Japanese and also checked Rocket Italian and Spanish trials and they all transcribe what I say into the appropriate language so you should contact support. 

At the beginning of this thread I reported frequent problems with speech recognition on a Windows 11 Home desktop PC in which Rocket Languages website reported "No speech detected, check your mic settings or our FAQs."   Today, I'm using the same microphone but on an older Windows 10 Home desktop PC, also with the latest Chrome browser (122.0.6261.57 (Official Build) (64-bit))  and it's running just about perfectly. Could it be a Windows 11 issue?

Ishan

It sounds like you are not using Chrome. If you use another browser it will record you but it won't transcribe what you say and compare it to the “correct” answer.  If you are using Chrome, then I would contact Support as it should be doing that.

Ishan, I noticed that what I say is only transcribed when I use a PC. It appears not to be supported on my iPhone. Maybe you are using a mobile phone in which case I suggest you use a PC with a supported browser eg. Chrome  

If I use Chrome on my iPhone, voice recognition works. It does not work in Safari (the “usual” browser for an iPhone). The app on my phone works, but it has lag and I try hard not to use it (not a fan). 

Hi kaichandler,

Thanks so much for your post, and to all of our fantastic forum users for your replies. I just wanted to make sure that you received our response to your email? Unfortunately it was only sent yesterday, so my sincere apologies for the delay in getting back to you. If you haven't received it, please let me know and I will ask the team to re-send. I personally tried the example you included in your message using my macbook inbuilt mic/chrome combo, and was able to get it to work without any issues. My colleague Jonathan has requested a screenshot of your errors console (instructions in our email), which will hopefully give the IT team a better idea of what's happening for you. As Jonathan mentions, VPNs, Adblockers, or browser extensions can all interfere with the voice recognition.

IshanG, as Scott_C already mentioned, it sounds as though you are using a browser we don't support, so instead I recommend trying either Chrome or Safari. 

Scott_C, love your work on the forum! We sincerely appreciate it.

You made me go look at my Firefox settings. I like the idea of opening in Private Window, especially on my phone. Thanks!

I have problems getting it to understand me some times as well. I am usinge Chrome and a Macbook Pro with the native microphone. Playback often sounds fine when this happens - and other instances with the same words will be accepted with no problem.

For single word prompts that fail, it often works if is say the same word multiple times (e.g., freddo freddo). Some times it works if i wait a beat before speaking, and some times it works if i say it really fast. A few just won't work no matter what, and i just mark them easy and move on.

Nice! Thanks for sharing. I use uBlock Origin on Firefox which also seems to block quite a bit (tough to tell what Firefox is blocking). I previously used Brave, but there were so many times websites didn't work well (mostly convenience stuff, which I admit means sacrificing privacy at times) that I moved to Firefox a few years ago. I do use DuckDuckGo as my search engine, but this site has given me some other ideas as well. Thanks!

Like Margie, I have found varying the tempo can work when I am not having success with the transcription. Usually for me it is to add space between words but I remember at least once where I said it fast and it was happy. These issues are rare (less than once per week), but all these techniques can help!

Previous feedback to Rocket on this issue got nowhere in terms of the bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, I'm putting this on the forum to vent, I guess.

Lesson 1.7 Spanish; Role Play as Mauricio:

Using Chome, Macbook, I can successfully record the exact same script that gets roundly rejected every time I role play as Mauricio.  Not logical on any level.

I thought I would be cunning, and use the app (iPhone 11).  Successs!  UNTIL - I got to (edit) “un quarto” where it insisted in translating it to “¼”.  This numbers glitch is an often-recurring issue with Rocket and was rampant in the Italian course for a while but after many complaints from me and others, got sorted out but with occasional recurrences.

I'm normally quite balanced with feedback, but despite being a fan overall, I don't think tech feedback after a system ‘upgrade’ gets taken seriously.  It's time that it did, becuase recently, I have stopped advocating Rocket on language forums.  Therein lies the thin end of the wedge in terms of customer satifaction.

Yes, I decided that the problems with speech recognition were so distracting that I decided to cancel within my trial period and received a full refund. Shame really, but as I understand the explanation from the ever helpful Jonathan at Support - was "can you please try clearing your Chrome cache by following these steps?:
 
 

• Go to Settings in Chrome by clicking the Menu Icon. (the 3-dot icon at the top right-hand side of the screen).
• Inside Settings, in the left-hand side menu, select "Advanced" and then select the last option: "Reset and clean up".
• Select the option: "Restore settings to their original defaults" and then on 'Reset Settings'.

 
Please also note that we use the same state of the art voice recognition software that is used by the likes of Google. Our voice recognition software works the best on the Chrome browser, with a pair of headphones, and in a quiet environment with no background noise. However, there are still some flaws. Most often with short or single syllable words / phrases. 

If you are struggling to get some of the shorter words / phrases picked up, we would suggest skipping over them. There is no detriment to you if there are one or two phrases that the system cannot detect. If you are confident you are saying the word correctly (which you can easily assess with short words) you can simply reveal and mark these phrases as "easy" in the activities section." 

Thanks, Kaichandler.  I think what Rocket do not address is (a) things were not nearly as bad an issue with voice recognition prior to this last ‘upgrade’ so how can it be ‘user error’?; (b) they brush it off (metaphorically) with the standard IT dept. ‘Is your PC switched on at the plug/clear your cache’ approach; (c ) strong levels of reasoned feedback from customers is effectively ignored; (d) the numerical translation glitch is a long-standing one.

That's been the path undertaken by many companies since I started studying management theory in the 80s, and it leads to one, inevitable outcome: customers change to or buy anew, a product that works and acts on feedback when it doesn't.

My standard mantra as an exec vp when customers apologised for complaining was “Why apologise? You're giving me free consultancy!”

I wasn't going to add to this as my experience has been said above (it is worse than it was in the past but not dramatic for me), but recently I have had to reload my browser in the middle of the session. It is recognizing as it usually does, then suddenly it is not working at all. If I refresh the browser it comes back. Interestingly while typing this it came back on it's own. I waited probably 1 minute until finding this thread to comment, so pretty long.

I am using the latest edition of chrome.

“recently I have had to reload my browser in the middle of the session. It is recognizing as it usually does, then suddenly it is not working at all. If I refresh the browser it comes back.”

I'm experiencing the same and it is really annoying. I keep losing a lot of time waiting for Rocket to become responsive again. It feels like working with a 20 year old computer and 56k modem.

Using chrome on Win11 and have done everything suggested. Nothing helps.

Please repair this!

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to reassure you all that the issues you are experiencing are not being ignored. The head of the development team sent the following information for me to pass on:

We've noticed an increase in reports of speech recognition "not working". First off, we know how frustrating and interruptive to your learning it can be. We apologize for the inconvenience and want to reassure you that we're working on it!

Now for some background. In the engine room, we are using the same state of the art, AI-powered speech recognition that powers all of google and apple services. However the nature of AI is that the results are ever changing and can "break" certain phrases, which is what we're seeing here. We have many ways to deal with this over the years and we're constantly patching things up to ensure the best accuracy possible. But there are still some cases where the technology struggles:

- where short words are indistinguishable from background noise, eg "ou" (French for "or")

- where the number format is mismatched, eg. twenty two dollars vs $22.

- where the phrase is not one used in everyday life, eg. sentence fragments.

- results are not absolute, they are tailored to your history of using speech services across all apps, so results can vary depending on the individual

We have ways to deal with all of these, but it's not bullet proof. Someone using our Android app in a cafe in New York may very likely get a different result from someone using their laptop in their bedroom in London. There are many factors at play.

Sorting these issues out is the next priority for our development team, which could mean changing how things work slightly. As such, in the coming weeks, we'll be in touch with everyone on this thread to see if we can isolate everyone's individual problem and find a solution for it. Please hang tight, and keep the learning in high gear!

I do have to admit I have thought about how tough it must be to get it to recognize single words or short phrases (since I knew it used the context of the sentence to make a best guess) and it mostly does a good job but it can be frustrating at times. Have you thought about just using $22 in the phrase alltogether. Then the answer of $22 would be correct and I can't imagine someone not knowing to say "twenty-two dollars".

Thanks for the update!

I appreciate the detail in the reply from the head of the development team, and understand the feedback re voice recognition.  

It would also be useful to know what system changes caused the strong level of adverse customer feedback only following the last upgrade; i.e. voice recognition hadn't changed as far as I can understand, but major glitches happened only after the upgrade.

Also, would it be time to beta test upgrades before launching to avoid such situations?

Chris

Hi everyone, Hesham here. I wrote the original reply that Margaret posted and am heavily involved in the development side of things.

@Scott_C It is quite tricky. One example we saw recently was “pero” ("but" in Spanish). The speech recognition engine won't recognise this accurately, since saying “but” out of context is much less common that saying “perro” (dog). However, with the burst of new AI technologies, we have some new ways of dealing with this, which we are beta testing as we speak! Watch this space.

@ChrisM108 Believe it or not, we made no changes whatsoever to the speech recognition engine in the latest update! It's purely coincidence that we're seeing more reports of “incorrect” responses. Speech recognition falls under the umbrella of AI, and the rapidly changing landscape of AI by the big tech companies are likely changing the responses we would ususally expect. The new approach I've mentioned above should be able to fix most of these issues! 
 

Thanks for your feedback, Hesham - much appreciated.  My last response accepted that voice recognition hadn't changed.  It's odd that the upgrade coincided with an upsurge in actual error responses based on much user feedback.  One of those IT mysteries, I guess.

Today the speech recognition feels normal again. Almost no delays. Hopefully it stays so.

Thank Hesham (sorry for the delay, I was out of town). Sound alike words are a problem is most languages I would imagine and not sure how any protocol will handle words in isolation. Context is so important, in speech recognistion and in real life!

Konnichiwa!

I have been using Rocket Languages Spanish for almost three years, and only occasionally do I have voice recognition issues. (I understand technology can't work perfectly all the time)  A few months ago I added Japanese, which although I am finding much more difficult than any romance language I have studied in the past, I am enjoying it very much, except for the constant issues with the speaking portion. Having read many of the replies in this string, I was wondering if this is a problem which plagues the Japanese course more than the other languages.

Arigato gozaimasu!