Text to speech voices: ATC?

  • Wow, there are some terrible atc voices out there! I was listening to a particularly bad one earlier, and was thinking that at the beginning of the 21st century, there had to be better.

    Which led to quite a bit of fun playing around with various text to speech programs, and this was one of the best. http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php

    Imagine if something like this was doable in a Flight sim! :love:

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  • I think when using the Bullhorn effect it gives the voices a bit more realistic sounding ATC effect. A proper use of commas, hyphens and dots actually create somewhat realistic sentences. Give them a bit of tune with a simple audio modifying program and there you go. Pretty fun page, yeah.

    Acapela Group is another good TTS service. I have toyed with their voices many times in the past when being creative with something. They used to have free and unlimited sample creation, but I guess many people figured out that they can use the voices for free by just recording them, because now they have added annoying background sound effect when your text is spoken.

    I also use real local ATC transmissions as a background gibberish depending on where I'm flying. Sure it's a cheap alternative, but still fun to use while we wait for the devs to implement the real one. :)

  • Wow! That's super cool. I wish we have something like this in the future.

    The best ATC software I used was ProATC and it also included the real ATC chattering for different parts of the flight (departure, taxi, take off...) and even for countries, so when you enter in the french, german airspace, the ATC language would be in that language as well. It was pretty awesome. I believe it's ilegal in some countries to record ATC conversations (in several countries in europe) but I wouldn't love IPACS to support it as a customization option for users.

    One thing I'd try to avoid in Aerofly future ATC is using Windows voices. The experience can be really bad for intenational customers (like myself), with usually one single voice repeating all the time.