Strange there is not yet a topic on that subject but SayIntentions is launching a “free” beta limited ATC solution at the moment called “OpenSky”. It is clearly does not leverage with their “full premium” solution, but as it is free, I think it could be nice to try it.
To get enrolled for a free beta: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o8-0du_kwjY and leave comment “OpenSky” and follow the link in the reply.
I thought “crippleware” was a thing of the distant past - I guess not…
There is a big difference between offering a slightly cut-down version - think of all the nearly full featured community editions out there - and this sort of completely gutted shadow of the real thing.
And I have to confess to being somewhat jaundiced about 3rd party sharks, no matter how good their offerings might be, extracting hard earned dosh from the pockets of poor punters looking for functionality advertised by the “prime contractor” but never delivered.
Just going to leave this thought here - I have been a SayIntentions subscriber for months (yes, the full premium product) and it is the biggest game changer for MSFS I have ever used. The only thing that adds more realism, for me, is highly detailed airplane models on the level of PMDG’s 737 or better.
Since this is free, you literally have nothing to lose by trying it out. The client is super lightweight because all the processing happens in the cloud. The only thing you need is a live internet connection, and it’s highly recommended to have a headset with a mic since it is true PTT, talk to ATC.
I’m pretty skeptical about a lot of add-ons in this hobby, free and paid. This one is worth every penny.
To be honest, you guys felt the pressure from the great experience with BATC to take this path.
You publicly denigrate BATC on their local LLM implementation. You made a lot of false statements about your true intentions and accuse others of being bad.
It’s just a bad decision on your part to charge $200/year for your bad technical implementation. Much more than what MSFS is charging!!
Just be humble and learn how to adopt small LLMs instead of having a superiority complex on your posts and YouTube about how good you are and how bad others are.
I don’t know about all the marketing stuff and back and forth between BATC and sayIntentions, all i know is when i have seen the product being showcased on twitch a few weeks back i was amazed.
Rushed to their shop just to see the most interesting features being locked behind that horrendously high priced sub model and saying “nope” to myself…
I’m not sure if it’s BATC or the arrival of deepseek and that potentially changing the ai market, or whatever their reason or motive behind this move is…
As a simmer, i am very ■■■■ happy and thankful about the new developments… I’d still pay for the ai copilot experience for example, just not that much, and preferably not in a sub model^^
I have been on SI for over a year now. The monthly subscription is a trip to McDonalds once a month. I needed to cut down on the fast food anyway. 
. I wouldn’t fly a flight sim without SI now.
BATC has never said anything about others. SayIntentions however has been slinging mud all the time. Just watch the guy’s latest offensive YouTube video.
BATC has been working on a local LLM for quite a while. DeekSeek has nothing to do with it. It’s just poor form with SayIntentions keep denigrating others for their technical decisions.
what about console? will this be available for us too or are we being ignored again?
This is absolutely irrelevant, this is about the program itself
This whole thing and the SI marketing dude is giving me late-night infomercial vibes…
xbox tag removed … maybe you check SA for this question … . But I don’t know if there are such add-ons for the Xbox at all
A completely voice-controlled ATC program instead of the dinosaur from FSX seemed interesting to me
IIRC the Xbox does not allow any local network communications to/from games. This makes any add-on that normally requires SimConnect, MSFSs API, not to work.
So I’ve tried the whole thing and I have to say that it only exchanges ATC instructions and does not carry out any air traffic control at all… I have no idea if all programs of this type are like that… but something like this cannot be called an ATC simulator… You could just call it a phraseology trainer
I have always been resistant to any non-human ATC. Been a VATSIM only user for years and years. Also have years of experience flying in the system in the USA. So I have a pretty good frame of reference for how ATC works and what is immersive and what isn’t. On the recommendation of a friend and developer of one of my favorite apps for flying in VR with VATSIM, I gave SayIntentions a shot last month. And I am incredibly impressed with it. Is it perfect? No. Sometimes I have to ask for descent or for vectors, but that happens in real life, also. I am pretty impressed with its ability to get me from clearance delivery all the way through a flight to my destination gate. And it does it all without using canned text/speech. You can interact with it almost just like you would interact with a human. The voices are really good - and they change depending on where in the world you are flying. Comes with a virtual FO that you can hand off the comms to (just like you would in real life if you are PF). The cabin crew is pretty amazing, too. As is the ramp staff who will connect up tugs and push you back (yes, I have GSX but SI does a really good job with this, too). All in all, it’s the most immersive ATC experience I have seen outside of VATSIM. Full disclosure - I haven’t tried the free version because I am a paying customer. But I think it’s pretty great that they decided to offer up a light version of the software for free.
BATC and Pilot2ATC offer this, with a one time price.
BATC has better voices and can understand you speaking more naturally better, I personalty think it lets to many errors slide though. It also can inject traffic that is aware and reacts to you.
Pilot2ATC uses Windows speech engine. You need to pronounce things a bit slower and deliberately. It has more options and a built in flight planner plus moving maps. The setup is a bit difficult (this has improved a bit in the latest version 3.0). No traffic injection. Also voices are limited unless you use Amazon Polly and that has a cost associated with it.
I’ve used Pilot2ATC 2.0 and BATC and prefer BATC. I may give PIlot2ATC 3.0 a shot once it gets out of EA but I dont want to waste the free trial of that until then.
It’s not that console gets" ignored again", i think y’all folks rarely get ignored for real… It’s more like a limitation of the platform you chose.
We’ll see what drops into the in-game marketplace whenever it pops up, i guess.
So far I like it. I don’t have a microphone and all I’m really looking for is an ATC system that I can let my co-pilot do the work. Anything is better than what Asobo gave us. My impressions so far is that there are no nags, thank god. If I don’t descend when it tells me to it doesn’t nag me. Speaking of descents, it tells me to descend way to early. For example on a flight from Chicago to Minneapolis it tells me to expect a descent in 15 minutes, but this even before I reached my top of climb and about 220 miles out. So it isn’t perfect. If you have a mic or type it in you can tell it when you want to descend. You don’t have to start at the gate, you can start on the tarmac or even spawn on the runway, but you must ask for clearance for further ATC instructions. It’s pretty lenient. You can just say ready for take off and not say who you are and it will give you take off clearance. Perfect for lazy people haha. It will be much better with a mic headset so thinking about getting one. Any suggestions for a cheap wireless headset? I’m on the one day trail thing I guess and I’m curious as to what the basic voices sound like. I’ll find out fast enough. All in all, pretty cool.
They’ve taken away the copilot for open sky so that will have me moving to batc.