I've tried several things to get arduino to detect talking like the mic breakouts and building my own opamp and plugging a more sensitive mic into the opamp, but none seem to be able to detect low enough levels that is talking.
anyone have any suggestions?
You need more gain so maybe a two stage amplifier is required.
Grumpy_Mike:
You need more gain so maybe a two stage amplifier is required.
hmm, alright --don't know much about them though, wouldn't even know where to begin. I did build this one http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Audio-Input/
would it be something similar with two op amps? and could I even build that and connect it to my arduino mic so I don't need larger mic?
Instructables are normally rubbish and this is no exception. Forget that circuit and get a proper design. Using two op amps just involves connecting the output of one into the input of the next. Look it up on Wikipedia.
The Instructables circuit will work with some types of microphones but not with electret microphones (which require a 5-9V power source) or many type of dynamic microphones. What, exactly, do you have?
Something with a max9812?
http://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/MAX9812-MAX9813L.pdf
Use a quad opamp like the LM324, this allows for 2 stages of gain and since speech is normally concentrated in the 300Hz to 3KHz range, use the other two stages as active band pass filters.
This will help with reducing other sounds not in the speech passband.
NOTE:
The LM324 is not a great opamp (rather old) but has the advantages of being cheap, easily available, requires only a single supply and for your application should be fine.