With many progrmas supporting speech rec. now, I'm one of those hoping it will be in FS200x (whenever).Strangely alot of people don't really seem to want it- I can't understand this. Imagine SPEAKING to ATC, and getting responses instead of pushing buttons. Way, Way better. Anyway, I think one of the misconceptions is that speech rec = robotic voices. That's completely wrong. The two are totally seperate components. The MS Speech SDK allows us to talk to our computers, and the text-to-speech SDK is to allow the computer to speak to us. It would be entirely possible to use speech rec. to talk to the computer, and use the sample voice sets (as FS works now). I think the reason several developers use the TTS (text-to-speech) engine is because it saves the trouble of having to record voice sets- which is no small task. Although it would be possible to use the voices that came with FS, they are incomplete for what many developers want to do. Also, recording all possible SID/STARS would be prohibitive.Personally, I don't like robotic voices myself, but with the possibility of the added functionality, it's not THAT bad of a thing. It would be nice if somebody could make a speech rec. program that could handle the built in ATC/AI, but I don't think it's possible.This is dreaming, but there is a way to basically give us all the weather/ATC/AI functionality we wanted and have it give us better framerates than we have now: What you would do is build a stand alone program that would read your scenery/traffic files, and then inject the traffic into FS. FS scenery enhancer, and lago's other programs have been able to put objects into the FS world. And then this program would provide all the weather (like active sky), AI (like FSSE), and ATC (like radar contact), and it could run on a seperate computer. The other bonus would be that you could hook your headphones up to the other computer, while FS played through your speakers. You'd have ATC on your headphones, and everything else outside, like real life! Ok, enough dreaming- but it could be done.

"Imagine SPEAKING to ATC"uhh.. dont have to imagine it, I do it on most of my MSFS9 flights right now and I dont meant VATSIM. There are, and have been, several programs freely available that provide an input based on what you say. They are fully programmable and work very well. For example, when I say 'roger' the pc select 1, 'wilco' selects another option, 'switching' ect...I have many of both the ATC commands and aircraft commands setup, been doing this for over a year - no problems.

Hi.As Mike mentions below there are some speech recognition programs that will give you a good start. What you want, in totality, can get very complex. The

It might be possible to create an addon to add speech recog but it would be dificult unless there's a FSUIPC-ish way of retreiving the ATC data from outside the sim. Because the numbers in the ATC menu change constantly depending on situation. For example if an airport has AWOS, the option to listen to that broadcast is placed on top and all other options are moved down and their selection number is increased by one (e.g. report Downwind becomes option #6 instead of %5 etc). So a particular phrase doesn't have a fixed number.Re. Microsoft TTS - there are some payware voices that actually sound very natural. They are quite expensive but they really sound amazing. Still simply adding speech recog to MS default ATC would be cool.VatSIM is OK for some people but the skies outside of major cities are empty which reminds me of FS98.