Arduino Due with EeasyVR 3.0 shield

I'm tyring to apply voice recognition to my project. I have already used EasyVr 1.0 with an older board but now I'm trying to use the EasyVr 3.0 shield with the Arduino Due board. I can already train the EasyVr 3.0 shield with the voice commander but I can't get it to work with the due. While Coding we first tried using softwareserial but that library doesn't work with the Arduino Due. Our next idea was to jump pins 12 and 13 of the shield to the Arduino Due TX and RX pins 18 and 19. Then hard coded for serial communication. In the serial monitor it is still not printing a response that we want. It says awake but then just gives us this weird "y"(with two dots above the y) character. If anyone has any advice on this subject please help.