@airtex2019 said in Possible future of BMS ATC?:
@SoBad fwiw there are separate efforts underway to use generative tech to make new TTS voices (accents) and/or allow new phrases to be voiced in existing Falcon-world accents … this is something that hamstrung development for a long time (and why the carrier LSOs all sound like Stephen Hawking)
but it’s not LLM or even traditional NLP (natural language processing) … still menu-driven comms, and selecting from a slightly-varying array of response phrasing.
@Stevie
Thanks for the responsive comments and the info about separate efforts being underway. That video link was interesting to me because it showed how non-robotic voices using more humanistic tones really enhances the feeling of interacting with ATC.
I get Stevie’s point about wording being more strict in a military environment. but it isn’t to the point of being robotic. I was a city cop for 30+ years, and we operate in a quasi-military environment where many words and phrases are part and parcel of the radio dispatching environment. But the human element always introduces small variations in word choice, phrase construction, pauses, intonation, etc. that make it obvious that humans are on the air.
For example, the recent efforts made by a “virtual crew chief” shows an impressive feeling of dealing with something more than phrases repeated again and again with the exactly identical set of words, pauses, intonation, etc. The virtual crew chief, even though script based, chooses from-- in almost every different phase of the start-up process-- numerous options of words, phrases, etc. that mean the same thing, but give it a much better sense of interacting with a person. And that video I linked showed the future promise of interacting with virtual people in a way much more like in real life-- hence the thread title “Possible future of BMS ATC”. It might take a number of intermediate steps to get there, but I think it’s inevitable eventually, with natural language implementation as commonplace (and free) as spelling dynamic libraries are today for programmers, for instance. This whole subject certainly deserves more than a dismissive “Nope.”
Thanks for the discussion. And now I finally understand why I kept seeing references to Steven Hawkings! (I don’t fly carrier craft and have no experience or interest in it, hence my ignorance of that part of the BMS environment.)