Wishlist: „ATC-Voxkey“ - Something like Voxkey for ATC transmissions

[RALF9636 1,956]

I really appreciate all the work that is put into MCE, in particular the massive improvements regarding the FO interaction with PF3, and the outstanding customer support. So please don't get me wrong here.

 

Nevertheless lately I got a little frustrated that my own ATC transmission still often are not properly transferred by MCE to PF3 – though the speech recognition is working fine. Be it that no command is recognized at all or a wrong hotkey is sent. I don't want to go into details here again because me and others have reported these issues before (e.g. VFR pattern, taxi request etc.).

 

I totally understand that you only have limited manpower and rather focus on other things with a larger customer demand than the PF3 interaction.

 

My idea is this:

For all other imperfections of MCE (and there always will be some as nothing ever is perfect...) an easy solution is already provided: I can do anything I like with voicescripts and voxkey. With these tools I can totally control what I want to say and what MCE makes out of my phrase. As you know I have had my own voxkey profile for a complete FO interaction with PF3, before you implemented this feature into MCE itself. And I can still use it for any shortcomings of this WIP-feature.

 

But voicescripts and voxkey are not usable when it comes to phrases spoken with the PTT button pressed, thus for phrases spoken to ATC directly.

 

I would like to have a tool to define a phrase that I can say with the PTT button pressed and assign a hotkey to that phrase. Just like voxkey but with automatically amended variables for things like callsign, runway and other readbacks. All the needed variables obviously are already existing in MCE because they are used for the built-in ATC features and various requests. They just need to be made available for the user to include the variable designation in the „ATC-voxkey“ command.

 

For example I define the phrase

„Tower <callsign> is turning final for landing runway <runway in use>“

and assign the key „4“.

MCE will know the callsign and the runway in use as these variables are already available in MCE. So for example when I say „Tower, cessna three nine kilo is turning final for landing runway three one“, I can then totally rely on MCE sending key „4“ because I - transparently - set it up like this.

As it is now I have no idea why it does not work because the speech recognition and processing into a hotkey is working intransparently inside MCE.

 

A tool like this would not only allow the user to iron out by himself any shortcomings of MCE but additionally would allow to adapt ATC phraseology to local customs or his own preferences. For example it would also allow to set up something like „give me that damn landing clearance now, <callsign>". Or even messages in different languages. It would extend the possibilities of MCE to a large extent.

 

Do you think something like that would be possible?