Forum Discussion
Storyline 360 Microphone Input
Hello, I am creating a training course that needs user input through microphone. Does Storyline support microphone input natively, and if not, are there any available workarounds? I have tried what some other (unresolved) post comments have suggested with altering iframes, does not seem to work for me or the OP of the posts regarding this I have seen.
9 Replies
You can get it to work with a web object and I believe Chris hodges on has some other examples.
I've tried the web object approach, the only way to accept mic input is by opening the object in an external browser tab and the transcript of the speech cannot be passed back to the original tab. If I choose the web object to be displayed inside the storyline training page itself the mic input is blocked
Hi PhillipRagain-e,
We don't officially support this method, but a member of the community shared a possible solution you can check out here. It involves tweaking the embed code a little bit to allow microphone access. Hope this points you in the right direction!
The web object will work outside of review. Review is an odd environment as the course is alreadying inside an iframe.
And I'm guessing a speech-to-text function is not available in SL. I need user input, via microphone, that is converted to text. Not finding anything.
Hello RussStill,
Thanks for reaching out! I can confirm this isn't possible directly within Storyline, but I've shared your voice with our product team. We'll share any future updates in this thread so all are in the loop!
Thanks. I do hope that gets on the development schedule. At the rate that "AI" type programming is advancing, this will be a must-have capability very soon. To make this work well, Articulate should also implement a "substring" function that allows us to parse out the text that resulted from the speech input. For example, search the text to see if a specific word exists. With this, users could actually talk to SL projects.
I found a post that referred to a JS solution. It does work, but requires an API call to his software to return the text. It makes sense that this should call Articulate software rather than someone else's third party code.
Hi PhillipRagain-e - Probably not the answer you are looking for as it certainly isn't a quick fix... But we have been successfully developing courses in Storyline 360 that can accept either free text entry to a text entry box OR the user can click a microphone icon - record their input, which then appears in the text entry box. It works great - make interactive text entry way faster, and is makes the experience more accessible.
The method we use is to create the microphone icon as a web object and the html code in this object uses JavaScript to set up an event listener. When the mic icon is clicked the event triggers JavaScript code that opens the microphone (assuming there is one) and starts recording, when the icon is clicked again the recording stops and the audio .wav file is sent to a small server-side app that then sends it to Microsoft Azure AI generative Speech services (others are available!) and the API call returns a text transcript which is returned and the JavaScript then passes back to Storyline in the text entry variable (hence it appears in the text entry box - and is editable if required)...
Sounds more complicated than it is. There's a video showing it working here: Adding voice-to-text recording to a Storyline course – Profile Learning Technologies
This is a video rather than a demo because, whilst Microsoft Azure is really cheap and most of our work is within our free allowance, there would be a cost if someone abused the demo.
Also wrote an article recently that explains how voice-to-text will change eLearning in many other ways. Designing with Voice: How Speech-to-Text Unlocks New Possibilities in eLearning – Profile Learning Technologies
May not help you if you are looking for a simple solution in Storyline - but thought you might find it interesting anyway.
Regards, John
