International Civil Aviation Organization. (2016). International Standards and Recommended Practices and Procedures for Air Navigation Service, Annex 10 Aeronautical Telecommunications, Volume II Communication Procedures including those with PANS status, Seventh Edition, July 2016
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TIL.
Still, having listened to a fair amount of real world US ATC, I donāt think they say treeā¦ Then again they are usually spitting it out so fast I canāt understand them entirely anyway.
I stand by the infection sounding like āfor milesā instead of āfour milesā
Iām honestly surprised that while the voices are more varied, the ATC seems like it hasnāt really advanced much since FS9.
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I canāt understand why there is any confusion regarding pricing. $60 Free for life with updates,
Better voices ( I find the free ones great ) you can purchase a 1 time update to improve the Ai voices. When that runs out purchase more time or use free voices. Its way better this way than a monthy cost. Ive been around flight simming for many, many years and have always wanted to try ATC but never wanted to use Vatsim. This looks great for ME 
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Also, with the tech being in itās infancy, Iām sure itāll come down in price as time goes on. We are only just scratching the surface in terms of whatās possible with AI.
I think Gav at Easyjetsimpilot does a pretty good job on the pricing models:
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Some of us have had life experiences to make us hyper vigilant for the āgotchaā - where we think we know what we are signing up for and suddenly find its like the Monkeys Paw.
You got what you wanted, but with a consequence you didnāt even think to ask about.
Obviously the consequences here arenāt so dire, but as one of the confused, that was my reason.
As soon as I got to the bottom and Talk time was described my brain reflexively said āah ha! I knew there was a catch!ā And then confirmation bias kicks in.
Its the undisclosed conseqence of living in a world of con artists. And no I have no reason to believe anyone involved is one, and sadly that doesnāt actually matter to my addled mind.
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I wouldnāt. Thatās more than what my real-life navigation EFB costs ā¦
if it even has ā¦ I used to have an ATC addon in FS2002 that did better IFR routing than the current default one. That was about 22 years ago ā¦
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For sure thereās no problem with that, you can use the offline voices for free. The whole point is the user gets to choose what works for them, instead of a one size fits all model.
FWIW the BATC devs have previously said they are passing on the AI voice costs without markup, they only make money on the initial software purchase. Thereās nothing that anyone can do about the actual cost of cloud based AI voice services, you either pay for them or donāt use them.
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Personally I am more hyped about it coming to beta, thus hereās hoping we can finally use it too sooner rather than later.
It certainly hasnāt, no vectors anymore just to expect them andā¦ nothing. I recently did a flight in FSX, apart from the obvious comparisons, ATC was markedly much better. Granted, no SIDs and STARs but at least it pointed you in the right direction.
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I expect the price for the AI voices to come down eventually. So many open source AI models are being released at the moment that are free to use, of you have a way to host
MSFS 2024 will include improved ATC and love traffic as well, according to the announcements. It will be interesting to see what the difference will be when it is finally released.
Based on my understanding TTS (text to speech) has nothing to do with AI. But itās very proprietary and naturally sounding voices are relatively expensive. Itās a well known technology that has been around for ages and very good models were already there in the late 90ā.
But still a good voice (and you need tens of them for this) is 100ās of dollars per user or you can go for cloud versions where you pay per word, which makes more sense for a service like this.
Speech recognition may or may not use neural networks, depending on the algorithm. But I would assume they just use the one built into Windows, which is āfreeā and quite good.
The AI in Beyond ATC is for sure the part where it recognizes the meaning of what you say. You donāt have to use specific sentences like with other addons like this. This is what sets LLMās apart from earlier technologies which were programmed against specific key words. Iām assuming youāll be able to say something like āEhmmmā¦ yeahā¦ Iāve been waiting for 5 minutes now, can you let me go?ā, instead of āXYZ holding short runway 34ā. Thatās the revolutionary AI part. But apparently, itās cheap enough that itās covered by a perpetual license.
Not sure about the actual ATC stuff, but I donāt think itās AI. I think itās rather a classical algorithm or a mix.
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I doubt we will get that. But for sure there will be independent reviews featuring not only the base package that comes for 60Ā£ but also demonstrating all 3 voice options.
So if you are not sure you might be better off waiting for those reviews to hit youtube before buying.
They have stated that the local voices are not SAPI, so I suspect theyāve embedded a 3rd-party TTS engine. Then the ābasicā voices are āregularā cloud TTS, and the āpremiumā voices appear to be āneuralā cloud TTS. They certainly sound much, much better, but then you get what you pay for.
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Actually you have that completely back to front. The AI in BATC is the very natural sounding neural voices which are the premium level. These have not been around for decades and are a modern tech. They are expensive to use because AI is generally compute heavy.
BATC as stated by the developers is not using AI or any LLM in order to parse and respond to instructions, that is all traditional code. One way to do this would be with a rules engine but we have no insight into the internals (although the lead dev sometimes live streams his coding sessions so maybe somebody has seen it).
On the other hand Say Intentions definitely is using ChatGPT to understand and respond to instructions, with some extra rules built on top as I understand it. So the two products are fundamentally different underneath.
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Ah, thanks for the explanation. I have to admit I just assumed it would be some sort of LLM underneath, like in SayIntentions. So BATC is more traditional in the way they encode the ATC logic, but is using advanced technology for the natural voices.
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I think youāre right. And yes, Iāll definitely wait. In fact, I never buy anything day one even when Iām convinced itās a fantastic product.
All your questions about pricing, answeredā¦
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Pricing seems fair to me. My big question that canāt yet be answered is how or if this will work on 2024 version. I am sure they will make it work, but I can imagine that will need two separate versions being supported by them and how long it would take to ensure it works on both concurrently. Hmmm 
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Itās in the faq:
Which simulators will BeyondATC be available for?
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and 2024
The program mainly works outside of MSFS and just deals with the public APIs which we know are not fundamentally changing because Asobo said that nearly everything is going to be compatible.
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Iāll believe that when I see it 
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