It seems the best place to showcase the power and elegance of the speech technology (that the MSFT is invested in for so long) is the ATC. Does anyone know what the team's opinion on the state of this technology and whether there is any consideration of speech recognition for ATC in FSX? Wow! the very thought of it excites me!! I know it may not be 100% perfect to begin with but hey it took several versions for FSX to get here.thankssrini

HAHA! I think we're going to have to wait for FS11 for that one ;)

>HAHA! I think we're going to have to wait for FS11 for that>one ;)A little birdy tells me, YOU MIGHT be wrong about that! NOT that it is built in but by some OTHER magic. ;)Carmine http://forums.avsim.net/images/wave.gifhttp://img155.imageshack.us/img155/7118/phoenixtp8mg.jpg

Whenever we've looked at this in the past the show stopper has always been the CPU and memory requirements. Most speech technology was written without real time performance as a concern and thus is not compatible with a program like FS that strives for consistent and fluid framerates.

I don't know which birdy your talking about, but this wasn't magic:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1123221217782777472

It's not coming from microsoft ;)

>Whenever we've looked at this in the past the show stopper>has always been the CPU and memory requirements.Agree. But with the ever increasing processor speeds, may be the time to reconsider?For features like this, probably FS may need to get out-of-box! and off load the processing to other network nodes. Not sure how well that it fits into your overall strategy. Anyway, i think most of the hobbyist run FS9 on multiple computers!! Again, you know better than I do about the numbers. Precisely for the reason you mentioned (performance impact), I wrote a crude ATC speech command recognition prototype that runs on a remote machine and sends ATC key presses via wideFS and FSUIPC. It is working well without any impact on FS. This solution atleast giving me the ability to communicate with FS9 hands-free *without impacting performance*. I am aware of others using speechbuddy or shout or something else, but I guess they all have to run on the FS9 computer which i wanted to avoid for obvious reason. However, as you know, there are several limitatinon with programs such as my prototype that have to run without either native SR support in FS ATC, nor API to hook into the FS9 ATC menu system. Eventually, we all want to *talk* to ATC and not just send commands as I do currently with my prototype.thankssrini

Maybe you were also sleeping. Microsoft does not seem to see the increases in CPU speeds/capabilities as something they can work with for anything but visuals this time around. We're probably going to be shelling out more money per "improvement" on this version to third-party vendors.

>It's not coming from microsoft ;)http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126613/article.htmlSorry, but that's actually true.

>>Whenever we've looked at this in the past the show stopper>>has always been the CPU and memory requirements.>>Agree. But with the ever increasing processor speeds, may be>the time to reconsider?>It's not really the speed, it's that the recognition or generation process doesn't provide a way to share the CPU while it's working. It has to execute to completion, which, if that takes more than a few milliseconds, will likely introduce a stutter because FS has to wait for it to finish. Sure, really, really fast CPUs might be able to compensate but ultimately you can always overwhelm them with work. Our own systems (like terrain for example) are written in such a way that that tasks not critical to rendering can be suspended briefly to allow critical work to be done. AFAIK the speech systems we've looked at don't have that kind of flexibility.Running the system on a seperate computer, which naturally is not involved in the render loop, is an interesting approach, though it relies on the user having that second machine.

Thanks for the clarification and makes sense. Probably the new generation dual processors help.>> it relies on the user having that second machine.Question for your marketing dept. I think majority of FS9 customer base already may have more than one machine. Or may be it might make sense as an add-on deluxe version option? However, I want to thank you for a diffrent reason. This morning after my post, started searching for more information on this topic and came across one of your replies where you mentioned about ""It's Hard to Wreck a Nice Beach" and naturally got curious.Found the article on the web and started readind it. It eventually led me to reading more about (you know how WW links wreck your time :-) )the MIT's "Open mind commonsense" and 'conceptnet' projects and AI in general. During the course of the reading, a brilliant young MIT AI researcher by name Push Singh ( http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/ ) caught my attention. Openmind project was his brain child and he is appointed to become Media lab professor. I started reading more about his work and watched an entire hour long video of him defending his Ph.D thesis (http://www.media.mit.edu/events/movies/video.php?id=push-2005-04-29). Then to my shock, I came to know that this young (in 30s) promising resercher unexpectedly passed away this year in an accident. That made it all an interesting day for me, starting with a question on ATC and speech recognition and ending up with watching a Ph.D defense video and reading a memorial wiki (http://pedia.media.mit.edu/wiki/Push_Singh) for hours and getting caught up in the memories of family and friends of a brilliant researcher. Wow!!btw, here is an article that he wrote as an undergrad student that prompted Bill Gates to write a personal note to him: (http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/why-ai-failed.html)I know this is all unrelated to what we are talking here. But just want to thank you for sending me down this road and making my sunday afternoon worthwhile. thankssrini

Two words - dual core. Is this an area where dual core systems could provide a significant benefit in FSX?Gary

>Two words - dual core. Is this an area where dual core>systems could provide a significant benefit in FSX?No. It doesn't matter how many CPUs or cores you have if the process can't be suspended by the main application.

I have uploaded my "remote" voice ATC program to Avsim file library. Anyone interested in this thread can give it a try (goto avsim library and search for the keyword "srini" and it should bring up the program download page). For background on this program, check this link: http://projectsri777.blogspot.com/ and read the post titled "wrote a program to speech control the Fs9 default atc from a remote machine".This is proof of concept and found it to be working beautifully with 100% recognition. Wish FS9 gave me better access to it's ATC menu system so that I could create more intelligent speech commands than saying "select one, two, three.."thankssrini

FWIW, there is VoxATC today. http://www.voxatc.comI own this product. A little too constrained for my taste. Promising though.