Where's the best place to get additional voices for Pilot2ATC?

Hi there, Where’s the best place to get additional voices for Pilot2ATC? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

  1. FREE: get additional MS voices. Although by default P2A can only ‘see’ two of the Windows voices, you can actually get a lot more working by doing some registry tricks (there’s a post in the P2A forum explaining this). Some of those are actually quite good (e.g. MS James)

  2. $$$ Ivona or CereProc: Though lots of people recommend Ivona, I wasn’t impressed by the samples on their website. I did like the CereProc voices much better, and purchased a few of them recently (they just had a sale during Easter week, and occasionally have others). I found though that their voices differ greatly in quality when used with P2A (pronunciation and intonation with ATC lingo), so you should try them out with specific phrases on their demo page. Also note that their current voice versions (V6) are reported to have issues with P2A, but they’ll provide you with the V5 version if you ask, and they seem to work fine

  3. $ Amazon Polly: Check out their AWS Polly plugin for Windows (there’s also a thread in the P2A forum about it). The setup is a bit involved (you have to set up an AWS account etc), but if it should work for you (unfortunately for me it’s a hit a miss with P2A. but other users have reported it works fine for them) it’s totally worth it - their voices are AWESOME naturally sounding (Ivona / CereProc don’t come close), and it’s really cheap - free for one year (5 million characters a month, plenty for P2A), and after that it’s $4 for each 5 million characters. Yes you need to be online (since it’s doing the text-to-speech via web calls), but you have to be online with MSFS anyways, and I have not experienced any lags / impact using these voices at all

Hope this helps,

Dirk

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I used CereProc and the voices sound great. They even had a sale, buy two get one free. Not sure if it’s still going or not, it’s been a couple weeks.

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Anyone in particular from CereProc you could recommend?

Sorry for the delay. I can only say that the three I got are great, I haven’t really tried others to say whether my three are better or worse than they are. You can test them all out, type in some of the ATC phrases into their website and hear them read back by any voice before you buy it.

With me being of the male persuasion, my “priorities” will probably be obvious. I got Kirsty - English (Scotland), Caitlin - English (Ireland), and Katherine - English (East Coast America). :wink:

Thanks for the Polly recommendation! Very easy to implement (although I’m an AWS certified developer) and the voices are so much better

U’re welcome! Yeah, I already had an AWS account and am familiar with the AWS eco system so it was not a big deal for me either, just thought I’d be good to mention it…

Let me know if it works for you consistently with P2A, for me the voices most often don’t play at all (but the times P2A does play them they work throughout the whole flight / as long as P2A is running)

I bought 6 voices, my personal preference list would be (in descending order)

Heather
Caitlin
Stuart
Kirsty
Hannah

I’d stay away from Giles, he sounds good on the website but awful when used with P2A

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Just to add to that “Jack” as it it can lag, due to format of TTS as it works on the old 32bit version protocol.

Hi @AwesomeBlack533 I just signed up for the Amazon Polly Voices,Where can I get the help file for setting up the voices for Pilot2ATC? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. Sorry, nevermind I found it…

Good that you found it out! One advice I have for you with Polly is to stick to the ‘normal’ voices, to prevent high cost. The ‘conversational’ and ‘neural’ voices are way more expensive after the first free year

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Hi there, In the polly player there aren’t any voices…How can I correct that? Thanks in advance. I downloaded the plugin like I was supposed to but there aren’t any voices accept the ones in the speech category in the windows setting app.

Did you create the client profile with aws configure --profile polly-windows ?

I am so angry I tried to go back into Amazon Polly Voices and they said that I don’t have permission and sign up for the IAM :rage:

Yes you have to create an IAM user account for this to work, so you haven’t done this yet?

All the required steps are outlined here:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/install-voice-plugin2.html

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Hi , I just tried about an hour ago and it didn’t go thru or I did a mistake and they said that I didn’t have access to that part of the site… @Woodstock327…I didn’t do anything wrong. I was wondering what @AwesomeBlack533 ,would suggest that I do? or anyone for that matter…

You only have to install Polly service on windows. Follow this tutorial to the letter, and click on the provided links if you don’t understand something (setting up IAM user for example):
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/install-voice-plugin2.html
After install, all you have to do is assign the Polly normal voices in P2ATC voice settings. I use the ‘assign random voice’ function.

I noticed the US English, UK English and AUS English voices work the best. The other languages speak English in native voice, so no current pronunciations. Still around 15 natural voices. And if you keep the Microsoft default for ATIS, you have real immersion by computerized ATIS and natural sounding ATC :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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I just tried it again all I got was access denied…I’ve had enough of this junk…I’ll just stick to the regular voices that are already in Pilot2ATC…

I followed the info in this video and have lots more voices now & the way to do it is very simple

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What do you mean by assigning the Polly “Normal” voices in P2ATC voice settings? I do not see any option for “normal” voice.

EDIT: I think he may have meant “standard” voices. Those seem to work and they sound amazing.

Thanks!

Kevin