Pilot voice and ATC call you "Wall Street Journal" when you use WSJ as a callsign

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Brief description of the issue:

When using “WSJ” as a callsign, the pilot’s voice and ATC will refer to you as “Wall Street Journal”. Note that this only happens with Azure; offline TTS does not do this.

This issue was reported on the official MSFS Discord server and I’m relaying it here. It was actually done as a typo. While I don’t know any reason why you would use “WSJ” as a callsign, if you were to do it by accident, this would happen.

Not a joke: I tried it also with “NYT” to see if it would refer to me as “New York Times”. It did not, so this seems to be limited to “WSJ”. But are there other company abbreviations that Azure knows about where this might happen? I hope that they are fixed with this one, too.

Provide Screenshot(s)/video(s) of the issue encountered:

I don’t know if other sound options other than the Azure setting matter, but I am including them just in case:

This was my customization for experimentation:

This is the result of following the detailed steps, below:

Detailed steps to reproduce the issue encountered:

  1. Start Microsoft Flight Simulator.
  2. Go to Options > General Options > Sound and verify that “ATC TEXT-TO-SPEECH SETTINGS” is set to “AZURE”. (Again, this does not happen with offline text-to-speech.)
  3. Go to the World Map, then Customization.
  4. In the Customization menu, set CALL SIGN to “WSJ” and FLIGHT NUMBER to any number you would like, though I tested with 1034. Your tail number does not matter for this.
  5. Start a flight. I tested it with the A320neo and Cessna 172 G1000, so it does not appear that aircraft affects this.
  6. You don’t even need to fly. You will hear this before you even start your flight.

Expected result:
ATC and pilot refer to me as “WSJ 1034”.

Observed result:
ATC and pilot refer to me as “Wall Street Journal 1034”. See video, above.

PC specs and/or peripheral set up if relevant:

Should not matter, but:
Brunner CLS-E NG yoke
Brunner CLS-E MK II rudder pedals
Virtual Fly V3RNIO+ throttle/prop/mixture
Flight Sounds X SOLO-GA

2.60GHz i7-10750H
32 GB RAM
GeForce RTX 2070
1 TB SSD
Windows 10 Home 20H2
OS Build 19044.1889


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Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?

Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:

If relevant, provide additional screenshots/video:

OMG! This is hilarious!

7 Likes

Are you expecting the callsign to be “Whisky-Sierra-Juliet 1034”? I’ve never heard of any airline to have that callsign before.

1 Like

This is something a user stumbled upon in the official Discord server. They were actually trying to use a different callsign and accidentally typed this in.
Is this the most important bug in the world? Absolutely not by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s clearly wrong. One of the other moderators noted that Azure has a list of abbreviations that it does this to. I haven’t seen the documentation, but my hope is that they will scan through the list and disable all occurrences of this kind of thing.

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Yeah, that’s the most likely explanation. While they’re at it. I hope they also keep their ICAO airline code and callsign database updated as well. CTV airline is being called “Are Aviacion” for far too long, while the actual airline with that code is actually having the callsign “Supergreen”.

2 Likes

Marked as Won’t Fix at this time.