Two Questions about ATC Voices

Are the ATC voices computer generated or voice actors?
If they are computer generated why can’t we have more variety? Always sounds like the same half dozen voices.
If they are actor voices why can’t we have more variety? Always sounds like the same half dozen voices.

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They are all computer generated. You can tell because certain words are difficult for the AI to Parse - either using Azure Text-To-Speech, or Offline TTS.

For Offline TTS ATC, the voice limitation is based upon the Language Pack installed for the Windows Operating System specific to your computer. You can get more variety by changing the voice pack support used by Windows OS, but that has potential gotchas as well as requires a bit more technical knowledge than some folks are comfortable with modifying on their own PCs.

As for Azure, there is a limited voice and accent range, but a variety that’s a little bit wider than what’s available local to the PC.

Microsoft shouldn’t be charging for them…those voice packs are expensive

Not sure but I wanted a more natural speech as I fly quite a bit on P2A if Vatsim coverage is thin.

Check out Polly Voices from Amazon. You can add theses to Windows. I would assume the sim would be able to pick them up if you set one as a default voice.

They’re free. You can switch language packs using Localization, but it requires some knowledge of Windows to do it. There are specific language packs that go with the local Windows language (i.e., US-EN, UK-EN, etc).

I don’t know that the sim will use Amazon Polly. Certainly that’s an option for Pilot2ATC though. These are the packs one can download and expect Windows to use, but you have to deliberately switch to a different pack, you can only use one at a time.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-download-text-to-speech-languages-for-windows-10-d5a6b612-b3ae-423f-afa5-4f6caf1ec5d3

I’m just glad there isn’t an airport at Worcester…

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Or Woonsocket. :grinning:

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Thanks all. Good info. Exactly what I wanted to know. I love this Forum.

I had a few minutes and did some exploring and it looks like Windows will support Polly (please see below).

I don’t have time at the moment to test in the sim, but if the sim uses the default voice like David, it may work. If I get back home early enough later today, I’ll test and post the results.

Go to the control panel and select Speech Recognition then, Text to Speech, After Polly is setup.

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I’ll watch for your report.

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Well, I fooled around with this for about an hour. Seems like the sim uses it’s own voices so Polly will not work in the sim. Polly appears to be limited to P2A and the Windows speech system. CasualClick is correct.

This would be a good feature to request. Allow us the ability to use 3rd party voices for those that prefer the in-house ATC. Obviously, not a priority, but perhaps something Asobo could do one day.

Thanks for the follow up. I took a look at the whole shebang and decided to wait to see what you found.
I agree that would be a nice feature but agree it’ll never be a priority. Funnily enuf, I recall that FSX had more and better voices way back then.

If you like flying with ATC, you can’t go wrong with P2A. I started using P2A as instructional prior to taking the leap into Vatsim, and love it. I’ve only been using the Polly voices with P2A for a couple weeks (when Vatsim controllers are offline) and I have to say, the voices are very impressive.

They still offer the 10 day trial.
https://p2atc.com/index.php/downloads

Thanks. I checked out the website you included and watched a couple of the vids. Very impressive program…but looks really complicated to use. I do like the simplicity of the in-game flight planner and don’t know if I’d have the patience to learn that program. I’ll look into it some more tho.
Thanks again.

That’s what’s great about this sim, it can work for everyone.

Enjoy flying.

I don’t know where you fly but you might want to take a look at:

ICAO/EU ATC Phraseology Mod

on Flightsim.to

They’re free because they sound lousy. I wish they had some of these for example: https://www.cereproc.com/en/storesapi

Then you can pay for the commercial ones. :man_shrugging: But the sim still won’t use them.