The basic voices themselves are good with mostly correct regional accents  but I seem to get the same voice for the controller and AI aircraft and it doesn't seem to use the basic voice I selected for Auto Respond which to my ears sounded the same as male controllers.  If I select a premium voice for the controllers then the voices work much better but I understood this thing worked well with basic voices.  However more fundamentally, at least on arrival into NZWN rwy 16, after clearing you to an intermediate altitude on descent it can leave it very late to give further descent clearances and you end up too high so it vectors you all over the place in order for you to lose altitude.  I guess this might happen IRL at a very busy airport but I only had a low setting for AI aircraft and having flown into Wellington many times IRL I know this sort of thing just does not happen.  While BATC  is early access I was hoping for a bit more realism. 

Bruce

Edited April 13, 20251 yr by brucewtb
typo

2 hours ago, brucewtb said:

The basic voices themselves are good with mostly correct regional accents  but I seem to get the same voice for the controller and AI aircraft and it doesn't seem to use the basic voice I selected for Auto Respond which to my ears sounded the same as male controllers.  If I select a premium voice for the controllers then the voices work much better but I understood this thing worked well with basic voices.  However more fundamentally, at least on arrival into NZWN rwy 16, after clearing you to an intermediate altitude on descent it can leave it very late to give further descent clearances and you end up too high so it vectors you all over the place in order for you to lose altitude.  I guess this might happen IRL at a very busy airport but I only had a low setting for AI aircraft and having flown into Wellington many times IRL I know this sort of thing just does not happen.  While BATC  is early access I was hoping for a bit more realism. 

Bruce

I suggest trying more flights. Basic voices are many for the english language, so I just think it was pure coincidence that you got the same voice. As for vectors, they work perfectly most of the time for me, but it might also be a case of adapting to how BATC does these things. Or sometimes they are just not perfect, as you said: Early Access.
I think if you get more flights under your belt you can get a more reliable impression. The vast majority of users likes and stays with BATC after a couple of flights, but it's a learning and adapting experience in the beginning.

As for the pilot auto respond voice: What you select is for premium only (to be more precise: the ATC has to be on premium, then the auto respond voice will also be premium).

Edited April 13, 20251 yr by Fiorentoni

13 minutes ago, Fiorentoni said:

As for the pilot auto respond voice: What you select is for premium only

Not exactly. The first 5 options are for basic (US and UK male and female and AU male): the voices that will only work with Premium will show 'Premium only' behind the names.

2 hours ago, brucewtb said:

and you end up too high so it vectors you all over the place in order for you to lose altitude.  I guess this might happen IRL at a very busy airport

no way. airport control zones at busy airports are too crowded and therefore too precious to get "vectored around to loose altitude". altitude restrictions at busy airports with their class Bravo/Charlie airports wouldn't allow for that. clearly a problem with this ATC product.

I like it very much using it with the original voices. It'll continue to improve as it's still an EA product. Be patient

And we do need a dedicated thread for this why exactly? There are so many about BATC, why couldn't this little review go in there?

2 hours ago, turbomax said:

no way. airport control zones at busy airports are too crowded and therefore too precious to get "vectored around to loose altitude". altitude restrictions at busy airports with their class Bravo/Charlie airports wouldn't allow for that. clearly a problem with this ATC product.

No matter which aircraft I am flying ,I just figure out where I need to start descending to reach proper altitude for approach and just ask BATC for descent permission. 

Thanks for the comments.  Looking at the BATC Discord server (which I can view but can't post -grrr) it seems this being too high on descent thing is a common problem - hope they get it sorted.  But yes I will have to do more flights to different airports.  As for the voices I chose AU male as my auto respond voice (I am Australian) but this wasn't the voice BATC used for auto respond.  Just wonder if they only have a small number of non US/UK etc basic voices and that just get reused over and over.  For example there seemed to be just one basic Australian female voice that got used repeatedly for controllers  and AI pilots.  Now i realise trying to simulate something as complex as ATC on a home computer is no easy task just not sure whether what we have at the moment is worth the bother.  For realism maybe  better to just fly using what is in the charts - we shall see.

Bruce

Sometimes BATC will put you on the STAR which is then mostly on you. I have been using it for a few weeks and I find yes it's always WIP but the experience for me great so far.

This regenerative AI space is going to evolve quickly and what we pay a lot for now will become very cheap before long. Kind of like "data" itself did.

Just confirming that unless you choose premium Controller voice you can get the same voice for Auto Respond, Controller and AI pilot - possibly always but may depend on what region you are in.  The whole thing sounds much better with the premium Controller voice selected but of course this is an additional cost that accumulates over time.

Bruce

2 hours ago, brucewtb said:

Just confirming that unless you choose premium Controller voice you can get the same voice for Auto Respond, Controller and AI pilot - possibly always but may depend on what region you are in. 

Auto respond will ALWAYS be the same voice (being the one you select), which is obvious and to be expected. The controller and other (AI) pilots are all using different voices on my PC... and that's with basic voices and accents off. Yes, after a while you do start to recognize voices because the amount isn't unlimited, but it doesn't bother me at all. 

With accents on you'd expect voices to be even more varied (because you are using a much larger pool of voices) but in practice this isn't the case (for me) because per region the amount of accented voices are quite small and you get the same voices over and over again much sooner. When you only use English voices, no accents, the voices sound a lot more varied to me.

The funny thing about free accent voices is that they are sometimes spot on here in Europe and you recognize the country from where the plane pilot or ATC controller is. But sometimes it is massively overdone resulting in speech that is barely recognisable as English, e.g. in Switzerland.

8 minutes ago, AnkH said:

The funny thing about free accent voices is that they are sometimes spot on here in Europe and you recognize the country from where the plane pilot or ATC controller is. But sometimes it is massively overdone resulting in speech that is barely recognisable as English, e.g. in Switzerland.

And you also sometimes get controllers with the wrong regional accent. I've had a dutch sounding person multiple times on London Control, or a greek sounding one on Munich Radar.

14 minutes ago, Farlis said:

I've had a dutch sounding person multiple times on London Control,

Yes, and it's been like that since they added those voices. Apparently it's pretty hard to correct. But I prefer the non-accent voices anyway. I just pretend every pilot and every ATC-employe has had a mandatory course in proper English. I rather hear everyone speak proper English than gibberish. It doesn't spoil the immersion in anyway. On the contrary.

7 minutes ago, mistolip said:

It doesn't spoil the immersion in anyway. On the contrary.

That is where I slightly disagree. Yes, in direct comparison to potentially completely wrong spoken accents hardly recognizable as English, yes. But flying around in southern Italy, in France or some eastern Europe countries, it would definitively kill the immersion if the ATC controller speaks in perfect english. 

I mean, I can speak and write pretty good english, but as it is not my native language, people would still recognize the accent I have. But if someone from southern Italy speaks with a texan coloured US voice, then no, this kills immersion as fast as those ridiculous basic english voices.