"Boina" is the short way to call the Green Beret in the Spanish Commandos 2 profile. I gave it to the recognizer, read by a synthetic voice, and it came back as bueno. That's Spanish for "okay."
It wasn't the only one. Before signing off on the profile, I ran all 147 phrases of the Commandos 2 voice commands in Spanish through the recognizer, one by one. 134 came back right. 13 came back as something else. And two of those 13 came back as the same word.
How the test works
It's not a play session. It's the same audit I described with the 249 phrases from Elite Dangerous, this time in Spanish:
- A synthetic Spanish voice reads every phrase in the profile.
- The recognizer listens with the grammar left open. That means it can answer with any word it knows, not only the ones in the profile.
- If what it hears doesn't match what was said, the phrase gets flagged.
While you play, EchoControl doesn't listen like that. It only looks for the phrases in the profile. The open test does the opposite job: it shows what else a phrase can be confused with, before it happens to you.
I ran it on September 4. Result: 91.2% on the first pass.
The 13 that failed
None of them were strange words. They're normal words for a commando game:
- "boina" (beret) → bueno ("okay")
- "Duke" → dude
- "Sid" → sí ("yes")
- "piloto" (driver) → el otro ("the other one")
- "caco" (thief) → que ("that")
- "pala" (shovel) → para ("stop")
- "parar" (stop) → para ("stop")
- "atar" (tie up) → qatar
- "metralleta" (machine gun) → me trader
- "buceo" (diving) → buche
- "apagar" (turn off) → a pagar ("to pay")
- "llaves" (keys) → ya ves ("you see")
- "cámara seis" (camera six) → cámaras seis
My favourite is "atar," which came back as qatar. You ask your commando to tie up a guard and the recognizer hears a country.
The usual fix is simple. What the recognizer hears gets added as a second valid form of the same command. If you say "atar" and it hears qatar, it still ties the guard up. I did that for 11 of the 13.
The two that wanted the same thing
The other two couldn't be fixed that way. "pala" and "parar" both came back as para.
If para picks up the shovel and also stops your unit, which command fires depends on which one the app reads last. One of the two would stop working with that word, and nothing would tell you which.
One word can only lead to one command. If it leads to two, one of them is broken even if you can't see it.
I gave it to "parar." It's the most natural mix-up: "parar" without the last r. "pala" doesn't get that shortcut, and it still works with its normal phrase.
While checking for those collisions, another one showed up that didn't come from the test. "salir" (exit) was in two commands at once: back to the menu, and get out of the vehicle. It had been there since the translation, and no test had caught it. Now getting out of the vehicle is "salir de aquí," closer to "out of here" in the English profile, and "salir" stays with the menu.
All of this went into version 1.0.1, the same version that brought Spanish.
What this test doesn't tell me yet
The audit uses a synthetic voice, in silence, one phrase at a time. It isn't my voice with gunfire in the background. It measures what each phrase gets confused with, not how a full mission goes.
And there's one thing I want to be clear about before I have an opinion. Three of the shortcuts I added are words people say without thinking: bueno (the Green Beret), sí (the driver) and que (the thief). If you say "bueno" out loud in the middle of a mission, the game now selects the Green Beret. I don't have a number yet for how often that happens in a real session, so I won't say it's a problem, and I won't say it isn't.
In English, this same profile had 32 phrases flagged in its own audit. In Spanish, 13. That's not a comparison between languages. They're two different phrase lists, with different words.
When I started, "boina" came back as bueno. Now "boina" calls the Green Beret. And so does "bueno."