Personal Comments and Observations
Apparently only VFR procedures to start with.
However IFR promised early next year.
Seems to be VR friendly.
No mention of pricing on website.
I’ll definitely be watching this one.
And some links to save others time…
Genuine competition is great news, that drives innovation.
This does seem GA focused though, where BeyondATC is approaching from the other end. I’m sure they’ll cross over in the middle.
Also BATC is becoming a full traffic injector and manager which will easily give it the edge at large airports, this one doesn’t seems to be ATC only.
5 Likes
GA VFR is what I mainly want, so that’s just fine by me. The voices actually sound better than what I’ve heard from BeyondATC so far, but this seems to be US and FAA only, which, if true, would limit it severely.
3 Likes
Sound promising and the ATC com seems better compared to BeyondATC. FAA and VFR as seen from the preview video really fit my personal usage of the sim.
Interesting to see where this goes. Only covers US at the moment and not yet IFR so a long way to go before I become very interested but intriguing non the less.
Hopefully when this eventually releases it will not be on a subscription basis. That’s the one killer pricing model for me and a guaranteed non purchase.
1 Like
Sounds interesting but from their website:
Online 24x7 across the U.S.
…so what about the rest of the planet?
5 Likes
Will you support Europe in the future?
OP·3 hr. ago
DA62
I doubt it would be a problem – just that I have absolutely no idea how ATC works in Europe. Would need to partner up with someone who really understood the nuances extremely well in order to get the AI model right.
I’m not opposed to supporting it - and there’s no reason we can’t. Right now I’m concentrating on getting the minimum viable product out the door.
PC Pilot
Asia too please! Majority of asia has the same with US apart from the trans alt and baro
Might take a while to figure out the costs due to the evolving nature of GPT4.x service pricing:
OP·3 hr. ago
DA62
I sure with there was another way… But yes… GPT-4 means every time you key the mic, or hear something from a controller, costs are incurred. I’m trying to figure out ways to do clever caching and other tricks minimize those costs.
If there’s a silver-lining, it’s that GPT-4 is getting cheaper, pretty rapidly.
It wouldn’t surprise me, though, if Microsobo is working on something similar for MSFS 2024 as part of the base sim. It’s a perfect technology showcase for Azure and Bing/OpenAI, considering they are also the prime investor in OpenAI.
3 Likes
Personal Comments and Observations
A couple of folks on volunteer staff have provided input to Asobo on Phraseology, not sure what’s going to happen. There’s still a lot of low hanging quality items that can be easily remedied in the locpak file. That in part explains why paid add ons like this have a potential market.
4 Likes
As I typically only fly GA and in the US, this is a very promising product for me. Definitely following. I far prefer the AI ATC voices in this compared to BeyondATC.
2 Likes
Where does the geographic limitation come into it? Is it more of a phraseology thing, and I could use it in the UK if I choose to fly in the sim in the US, for example?
The product dataset for ATIS, GND, CLR, DEP, APP, etc. frequencies for example may be limited only to the US. Just a guess based on the demo and some of the comments the author made in other channels.
3 Likes
It would be nice if it had the option of hooking into a Navigraph subscription, if available.
2 Likes
Will there be plans to inject traffic with Smartsky? Given how important it is that the ATC understand what traffic is around to ensure correct instructions to the pilot, I would say that BATC (if they can crack it) is the better proposition at the moment.
1 Like
Honestly, I’m not sold fully on either one because the lightest performance load is still Live Traffic. If you can’t work with it, it reduces the compelling buy motivation for me.
Smartsky is definitely impressive, and as RagingWombat said, competition is great. I love the way these products can parse speech so well now. My two concerns with the product(s) are the cost structure and performance. I’d much rather pay more up front to own the application, but I get that software companies are moving more toward a subscription model. And by performance, I mean not only how well it works with MSFS in general, but how it would work if and when it handles traffic injection. That’s a lot for a single app to handle.
Correct place name pronunciation, especially in Europe, would be enough of an improvement for me.
The default ATC always say Lion instead of Leon for Lyon, and Edunberg instead of Edinbruh for Edinburgh. Come to think of it, they always refer to any Embraer aircraft as Embury, and they always say Tree instead of Three - the list goes on!
And that would be correct:
Under Category, select ‘General’. Then under Context, select ‘Numbers’.
3 = Tree
9 = Niner
. = Decimal (for us Europeans)
The place and aircraft names are wrong as AI speech can’t handle them unless programmed with the correct pronunciation.
Thank the Lord no one has to say three lions have escaped from Edinburgh zoo over the radios. Imagine the confusion!
8 Likes
Also 4 = fower, and 5 = fife.