Winboard Forum

Hi!

I'm trying to make a program that uses Winboard GUI and Stockfish's chess engine to allow me to play chess using voice commands. I'm using visual studio and C# to translate voice commands into Algebraic notation. My problem is the communication between my program and winboard. Should i send the moves commands to the winboard? or to the chess engine? How do i send the moves?

Thanks in advance!

The best way to do this is disguise your program as an engine (a so-called pseodo-engine). Say you call it 'Voice', then you can set WinBoard to play a game between Voice and Stockfish (in Two Machines mode). Any time it is Voice's turn to move, the latter would wait for you to say something, and then send the move you spoke to WinBoard on its standard output (using the proper WB protocol syntax for that, e.g. "move e2e4"). It would have to read the commands sent to it by WinBoard on its standard input, to get the opponent moves and other general commands (such as 'new' and 'go') to deduce when it is its turn to move.

That's a very interesting way to approach the problem.
Thank you so much, i will be trying to implement the program this way.