...Is allow us to provide our own AI voices. 

I've been messing with both MS' Azure and AWS's Polly, and it seems like a no brainer to simply let us input our AI key and use whatever we choose AND pay for. Or give us the option to use Microsoft's built in voices. 

you would enjoy P3D ATC Addons for other reasons as well .. maturity is one 😃

1 hour ago, vadriver said:

you would enjoy P3D ATC Addons for other reasons as well .. maturity is one 😃

Great input, I'm convinced he wanted an ATC for Prepar3Dead

1 hour ago, vadriver said:

you would enjoy P3D ATC Addons for other reasons as well .. maturity is one 😃

Geriatric is the word I'd use.

17 hours ago, bahnzo said:

...Is allow us to provide our own AI voices. 

I've been messing with both MS' Azure and AWS's Polly, and it seems like a no brainer to simply let us input our AI key and use whatever we choose AND pay for. Or give us the option to use Microsoft's built in voices. 

Yes but then they can’t charge a subscription, which is where the real money is. You are talking about cutting out the middle man.. and asking the middle man to cut himself out. Unlikely to happen 🙂 

1 hour ago, JonathanC said:

Yes but then they can’t charge a subscription, which is where the real money is. You are talking about cutting out the middle man.. and asking the middle man to cut himself out. Unlikely to happen 🙂 

Well, I think you hit on one of the reason for sure. Both Azure and Polly give you generous free amounts of characters to use each month. And they also have all the regional voices which these programs are using. It really seems they are reselling us these AI voices. I guess with all the different programs which have appeared, we can hope one will hope to stand out by doing this. 

On 10/22/2024 at 2:05 PM, JonathanC said:

Yes but then they can’t charge a subscription, 

I haven't even tried the subscription voices on BATC. The free ones are plenty good enough for me. Given that they made this an option, I doubt they're trying to steer us away from AI voice services.

Yeah, I'm not privy to the inner workings of these dev houses, but in general it doesn't make sense to build a value-added service on top of an LLM, and then not capture the value you added. If the developer has figured out a way to make money without paying expensive GPT API fees, they will have a competitive advantage. If not... they need some way to cover their own costs, or else they will go out of business.

A lot of the "AI-on-top" services are all trying to figure this out right now. At some point, someone will come up with a business model that works, and most devs will converge on it  - because it works. Just like how software switched to a subscription model over the past decade or so. A few tried it, figured out how to make it work (either via lock-in/monopoly like Adobe/MS Office, or genuinely new pricing models like Jetbrains), and then everyone else followed suit.

On 10/23/2024 at 1:29 PM, eslader said:

I haven't even tried the subscription voices on BATC. The free ones are plenty good enough for me. Given that they made this an option, I doubt they're trying to steer us away from AI voice services.

I've no idea how they are doing this, because those voices are very much the low tier AI voices provided by either Amazon or MS. And they cost money by the character just like the better ones, but at a reduced price. I really have no idea how BATC is covering it since they are just a one time fee with the better "premium" voices being something you have to purchase character bundles for. 

Edited October 26, 20241 yr by bahnzo

14 hours ago, bahnzo said:

I've no idea how they are doing this, because those voices are very much the low tier AI voices provided by either Amazon or MS. And they cost money by the character just like the better ones, but at a reduced price. I really have no idea how BATC is covering it since they are just a one time fee with the better "premium" voices being something you have to purchase character bundles for. 

Probably by setting the premium voice price high enough to also pay for the regular voice users. But that's just a guess.

Really, as much as I like BATC I suspect it may not be a long term thing. Not through any fault of their own, but I've looked at the economics of LLMs and... They just aren't there. These things are burning through cash faster than Red Lobster and the venture caps are starting to get anxious to see a return.

On 10/26/2024 at 12:56 PM, eslader said:

Probably by setting the premium voice price high enough to also pay for the regular voice users. But that's just a guess.

Really, as much as I like BATC I suspect it may not be a long term thing. Not through any fault of their own, but I've looked at the economics of LLMs and... They just aren't there. These things are burning through cash faster than Red Lobster and the venture caps are starting to get anxious to see a return.

I have to imagine Asobo and MS will at some point come out with AI voices on their own. I mean, Azure is MS and if you've messed with their AI voices, they are pretty good. I'm sure BATC and the rest are using them or Amazon's. It makes sense for MS to want Asobo to use their AI and potentially sell it as well. 

I also don't understand how they are paying for the AI which is parsing your voice input. I assume that's ChatGPT (are there any competitors?) which isn't just giving their tech away and certainly not to a company selling a product. 

The real issue is fixing the ATC, which I won't bother arguing with folks about. There's some real fans out there of the various AI ATC addons. But it just makes sense, to me anyways, that Asobo/MS will have their own AI ATC at some point. I know one of their talking points about MSFS 2024 was ATC will be addressed. 

11 hours ago, bahnzo said:

I mean, Azure is MS and if you've messed with their AI voices, they are pretty good. I'm sure BATC and the rest are using them or Amazon's. It makes sense for MS to want Asobo to use their AI and potentially sell it as well. 

Yeah, they are, but it it takes *a lot* of power to be that good. MS is restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant solely to power its AI ventures. Amazon is building 4 nuke plants in the Amazon for the same reason. Google's going to build 6 or 7 of them.

In short, even if you bring AI in house, you're going to spend mountains of cash just keeping it turned on, much less what you spend on the AI datacenters themselves. If you can use it to design something that makes you fabulously rich, great but if not, that's still a lot of money you're sinking into something for which there is unclear return. Yes, we'll all love the AI ATC voices that sound like Kennedy Steve, but very few of us are going to be interested in paying what it would take to even make such a thing break even.

 

Edited October 29, 20241 yr by eslader

On 10/22/2024 at 1:46 PM, Sethos said:

 Prepar3Dead

Clever, but far from the truth.

On 10/26/2024 at 7:56 PM, eslader said:

Probably by setting the premium voice price high enough to also pay for the regular voice users. But that's just a guess.

Really, as much as I like BATC I suspect it may not be a long term thing. Not through any fault of their own, but I've looked at the economics of LLMs and... They just aren't there. These things are burning through cash faster than Red Lobster and the venture caps are starting to get anxious to see a return.

Yes, you burn through about 20 to 30K characters on a 2 hour flight if you have controller and pilot voices active and are using an aircraft injector.

$9.99 for 250K characters is not sustainable, as for most people the constant shelling out for premium voices will soon wear thin.

It has for me and I've only used it for about two weeks.

In MSFS 2024, you can record samples of your voice and after than MSFS will automatically use your voice for all ATC comms.. looking forward to trying this out