And yet another video dropped. This is about a cost-free voice option. As I understand it, they think about the option to use low quality voice that is locally generated. This voice doesn’t add to the base cost.
Here’s the complete message
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With AI, new voices are child’s play. With a three second clip of anyone’s voice, AI can fool somebody’s mama.
If Beyond ATC goes the $500 a year route, it’ll only be a matter of time before they’re put out of business by someone delivering James Earl Jones & Morgan Freeman as Ground & Tower at my local Class Delta.
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Captain made this tentative calculation:
1 million characters = $16, a flight with traffic is 50k characters per flight, a flight with no traffic is 5k characters. 50k/1000000 = 20, so 3 times per week = ~1.5 months. Using no traffic, 5k/1m = 200 flights, so 3 times per week = ~8.3 months
Will this work in VR? Is it for both VFR and IFR?
VR: Yes, but the question is whether the interface is optimized for this in the first version.
IFR: most certainly so. All video’s are demonstrating this.
VFR: they say Yes, but there’s no info on how this will work and to what depth they will implement this.
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I’m one hundred percent certain we’ll be able to minimise that
Looking forward to seeing a video with ai traffic in place.
I’d personally be willing to pay up to 10 usd/eur per month for high quality voices. But I’d really really prefer a non subscription solution but understand if that isn’t possible sadly.
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I miss they days when you paid for something once and owned it outright. Pay per character is the most ridiculous thing I think I’ve ever heard. As much as I like the idea of this new ATC system, I certainly won’t be paying for voices!
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I like pay once as well, but BeyondATC is charging you what they have to pay to the AI TTS provider who charges on a per character basis.
Also, @thecoronadian @AndyXPO don’t forget that there’s going to be a free, offline voice option.
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Assuming these are accurate, another way to put this is each flight costing you 80 USD cents (16/1M*50k) (with traffic because who wants to fly without traffic?).
What puts me off more than a potential subscription, is that will constantly be in the back of my mind. Psychologically an unlimited subscription would be more palatable for me, even if in reality it might be more expensive.
I will probably use the free voice option and try to buy some hight quality offline voices. But then I assume regional accents won’t work at all.
Heres to hoping that these voice providers will get cheaper.
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What determines a “flight” in this example? As in, how long of a flight are we talking about, and what type? Is this a 1-hour GA VFR flight or a 4-hour commercial airline flight? I’m sure they don’t use the same amount, right? Where the individual in his example flies 3 times a week, I fly 3-5 times a day and always use traffic. So, using his math, and assuming I averaged 4 flights per day for the month, that’s just under $100 per month for this service for a user like myself. That’s nearly $1200 a year, which is even more than my initial estimate. And this is the basic package pricing. Yikes.
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Let’s not forget there’s the free voice option, which should be totally useable imho.
$0 a year.
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I hear you. But again, BATC is not to blame for this. They are only forwarding the cost for the voice generation. They don’t earn a penny from this. So yes, heavy users will pay a steep price. Like more bandwidth is more expensive. There are whole server farms running for this technology. Maybe there will be given larger packages. We’ll have to see
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I’m not interested in laying blame or assigning responsibility. I’m interested in good products at reasonable prices.
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Never mind!
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You’re absolutely right. AI is not the text to speech part of this. That has nothing to do with AI.
I’m assuming AI is mainly used for the tokenizing (making sense of) what you’re saying part. Maybe also for voice recognition (although that works quite well offline).
Because understanding what you’re saying (without requiring you to use exact words in exact order) is the main selling point of this product, I don’t think there is a way around a subscription.
I think they have not figured out the pricing model for this yet. If they had there would be an early access version available.
I don’t see the need for online voices at all. Previous sims, and ATC add-ons, installed voice packs within the sim itself and these worked perfectly well without the expense and unreliability of cloud-based AI services.
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Never mind!.
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Fair enough, but I suspect that the latest cloud-based TTS models will be just as unreliable as the current cloud-based TTS models, because they’ll still be cloud-based.
I would really like to have an MSFS version of Radar Contact for FS2004 and FSX, which had dozens of pre-recorded voice packs for the user to choose from for Pilot, Co-Pilot, Controller and AI Pilot voices based on nationality and/or the voice actor’s names; and more importantly it wasn’t affected by internet connection speed, AI traffic density or airport scenery size/complexity.
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I do understand AI, I’m a Software engineer myself.
I’m just pointing out that the developers have said themselves on their discord:
Ultimately, this means if you do not want to use AI voices (besides the free amount that comes with the program) you will never have to pay another cent for BeyondATC beyond the initial price!