ignoring growing pains on both BATC and SAI, I think both will end up (6-12 months?) being good AI ATC covering the both VFR/IFR with some traffic.
BATC feels less ambitious, more focused on ATC only.
its also aiming to be a single player (only) option, the traffic is all AI.
now embracing LLM, it does feel less on rails than it did.
I kind of like this approach, I could see it as a stepping stone to vatsim (for multiplayer)
SAI feels more encompassing, also it does feel more open / flexible.
I think the co-pilot concept, is also a brilliant idea, as its a communication channel to ask things - that dont make sense to be using ATC for, but in role-play suits a co-pilot e.g. checking things on a chart.
I think the multiplayer Skynet could be fantastic..much more fun that AI traffic, more dynamic. BUT the main caveat is uptake, if we only have 100 pilots over the entire world it will be pretty dead.
I suspect this is why they released the free OpenSky version to help populate the world.
so different approach, for now Im using BATC more, but honestly, Im reconsidering this.
Thank you for clarifying in my mind that I made the right choice by going with BATC. I sim to get away from people, not to have to deal with even more of them (or a simulation of them such as āfunnyā cabin crew). That is why I have never switched on multiplayer in MSFS and need a good traffic injector. BATC has replaced my previous combo of Pilot2ATC and FSLTL, and Iām enjoying it very much. Looking forward to the VFR features that are on their roadmap.
I just want to say, as a real world pilot, I love SayIntentions. I havenāt been able to use it for a while as Iāve been busy with film projects, but being able to communicate with ATC as per real life leaves me stunned every time.
Is there a way to be able to get a direct line to the devs? I have some things that may help improve SayIntentions and would love to assist. I have an extensive background in Flight Sim since version 1.0.
This is actually an understatement of how these people work.
Brian (the CEO) is more that just āactiveā in their Discord. He seems to be around most of the day (I now know he never sleeps), not only developing stuff himself but also communicating directly with all users, sometimes even debugging specific issues personally with direct contact with the reporter. Good luck finding others like him in the sim industry.
On top of everything else, SI seem to be always open to new ideas. Thatās one of the reasons theyāve expanded the scope of their app so ridiculously much in just one year. Theyāre literally presenting new features every week while ironing out the existing ones.
As much as Iāve criticized SI on this forum for adding too many features before perfecting the basics, I must tell you what happened on a flight I took yesterday.
On an IFR flight in Japan I thought Iād ask the tour guide about a city I was passing. I pushed the button and asked āWhat is that city on my right?.ā But instead of pushing the intercom button I mistakenly pressed the ATC comms button.
Before I could say āuh oh,ā the controller said, āThat city on your right is Wakayama.ā
I said āGreat, thanks.ā
He replied, āYouāre welcome.ā
This was totally unexpected and made my day. Even the AI controllers have a personality.
I do have one negative thing to say about the SI team.
They do NOT advertise the features it has well enough. I have been using it since the end of January and only discovered Tour Tuner just a couple of days ago - coming across it by accident through spotting a link on the Pilot Portal web page. I had never heard it mentioned anywhere before, and itās brilliant - pretty much like an infinitely customisable instant bush trip feature with a huge library of tours made by other players.
The same is true to a lesser extent regarding Sky Ops - itās a great selling point but they donāt bang the drum about it nearly enough.
This is simply not true. If you donāt know how to optimize your AI/ML stack, yes it can be expensive. This is why many of us who knows what we are doing with AI/ML have very little regards for SI. Their architecture is fundamentally flawed. Itās a brute force approach without properly figuring out what you need and what you donāt. They need a real AI/ML architect who can tell them exactly what to do. So enough with the nonsense of AI/ML is expensive. With anything, if you donāt know what you are doing, it will be expensive.
Relying on OpenAIās full LLM is a mistake on their part. Instead, they should have done their due diligence and investigate small LLM models via Hugging Face to see what works better. Did they even bother with LLama models? I hate it when SI did a bad job in their architecture and people just eat up their nonsense.
Why does every one of your posts in this thread and others about SI sound like a marketing ad?? Are they still paying people to post this stuff everywhere?
No idea, I know theyāre not paying me and my subscription has even expired as Iām not using MSFS for a couple of months now.
Itās just that some of us who were after a proper ATC tool for years and years, have finally found something we can work with, so please allow us to be amazed. Those who donāt like the tool can always look elsewhere.
For what it is worth, I do have experienced quite a few issues in my flights with SI (some more serious than others) and Iāll usually send them feedback after each flight hoping theyāll keep improving their product.
Fair enoughā¦itās just these type of similar posts are showing up everywhere and I am aware of what they are doing from a marketing perspective and nobody disclosing it.
ETA: I opened up SI today and it had an update. Everything seems to be working fine now.
So I just used SI for the first time today, and so far Iām loving it. However, I canāt get the mentor or the tour guide to work. ATC works fine, but whenever I try to engage the other two through intercom 1 or 2, nothing happens. Also, during my initial flight, the tour guide never said anything.
Iāve double checked my key bindings for SI. There are no conflicts between it and the sim. I double-checked that I had everyone on the channels I wanted. Any thoughts on what might be happening?
This generalization of yours isnāt helpful either. It all depends on the scale and the architecture. Yes, AI/ML is expensive mainly due to hardware requirements, especially when weāre talking about CREATING custom models (training), trying to serve a massive user base shooting lots of requests, some of them probably very complex, and then youāve got STT and TTS which are in a sense also AI/ML based systems, all of which need to be interacting with each other in high speed.
We donāt know whats really going on below the hood at SAI, so itās all just guesses from people who are considering themselves experts, like you and me. Iāll leave it at that.
For someone who is deep in AI/ML, itās not hard for us to figure it out. The owners of the company have said many things that are very revealing on their technical expertise.
It is very simple. Just think about your own personal expertise. When you hear people with very little knowledge talk about a topic that you are an expert in, you will quickly know where their skilsets are.
This is the SAME exact case for us on SAI.
Thatās not advertising them well enough. I watched many of the SI Youtube videos before and after purchasing it. I found out about Sky Ops completely by accident talking to one of the devs on Discord. I donāt recall seeing it on their main web page at all - thatās not to say itās not there, but if it is, it didnāt get noticed by me as a potential customer, or me as an existing customer. If advertising is effective, customers will see it AND remember it. I would hazard a guess that if you were to ask the average forum member who is a non-user of SI what it does, they will mention ATC, they may mention cabin crew, but I doubt many of them realise all the other stuff it does.
I donāt think they got off to a very good start. I first tried it a couple of months after it was first released and Iāll be honest I was very much under impressed with it.
A few weeks ago I decided to try it again after a few particularly poor experiences with its main competitor and its dreadful vectoring.
I was amazed how far SI had come in a little over six months. Iām once more enjoying the ATC experience again. When traffic and FO checklists arrive it will be much more complete experience for me. And no I didnāt know about all the new stuff either until I started using it again.
