Verbal Commander by K2 Interactive Review by Goy Larsen
Requirements: Win95/98, Sound card and mike,

A few weeks ago I finally broke down and ordered this thingy, racing online on TEN I really needed something to help me with my Autochat messages and all the little stuff is not highly recommended at other tracks than Dega, maybe not even there, up until now I had been using the excellent GP2BTN utility, but this has serious limitations, on my setup I could only program 5 keystrokes to my Joy buttons, and there's plenty more you need, really.

The Verbal Commander finally arrived a couple of days ago, to say I was like a kid on christmas eve is no exaggeration really, opening the box from 4CD's took forever, (do they really need all this packing stuff to ship this thing across the Atlantic :-) and there it was.....

Verbal Commander consists of an ISA card and a headset basically, the software is Win95 native and very easy to use, had the thing up and running in 10 mins flat (but then I never keep the lid on my PC :-) and was ready to start programming the essential keys for TEN/NROS.

The programming itself is very easy, there's an excellent tutorial in there and it really is so easy that even dad can do it (like most guys I never read the instruction manual:-),the problem starts when you begin to "train" the voice commands really, it's not difficult as such, the problem is to find words for the different commands that can not be mistaken for another one in the heat of the moment and then to use the same tone of voice as you think you'll use when you're racing, not as easy as it sounds and I still have a few commands that are too similar, but I'm working on it, 20 commands is the limit and that's more than good enough for N2 really, giving me the option of duplicating some of the more frequently used commands and thus giving me more of a chance to get it right in the heat of the moment, there's also the option for setting the sensitivity, but I haven't really played around with that one yet, but I guess if you're going to use this with flight sims or something a bit more advanced than N2, you would probably need all the 20 commands and this option could be very useful

I can well imagine that once trained properly for best ease of use, this will be an invaluable addition to my control setup and I will probably never know how I got by without it, and the ease of use/setup and the fact that it will work with every game out there, Windows based or DOS based doesn't matter, not to mention the fact that it has dropped considerably in price since I first heard of it a couple of years ago, makes it a worthy addition to the control setup of any serious "sim head", I paid 49.95 + p&p from 4CD's,(was a bit pricey to have it shipped by DHL across the Atlantic, but it was delivered on my doorstep by a messenger just 2 weeks after I ordered it and it gives you an option to trace the package, so I guess it was worth it) and I think it's worth every cent. Would I buy it again now that I know what it's like ? , no question !!!

Not really, you'll need a free ISA slot though (I didn't have any, so there went my trusty TM ACM gamecard, but the gameport on the SB Live! is way better than my old AWE32 so I don't think I'll be missing it much) and this is not something everyone have, especially if you have a "brand" PC (Compaq, AST etc) and it's a "desktop" model instead of a "tower" model, but that's the only drawback I've found, that and that you need to use a headset, if you play games with a earphones, I guess you're in trouble, but I suspect that the provided headset could be substituted for a tabletop microphone or something, but I haven't checked (the headset is supposedly a high quality, noise cancelling model).