navigraph is the only one choice with subscription though it is also very expensiven. 

Edited October 10, 2025Oct 10 by MayuyuYukirin

22 hours ago, guenseli said:

We simply haven't seen the anticipated price-drops from the AI compute and AI voice industries that so many anticipated.

I mean, did anyone seriously anticipate that?

Microsoft and Google are each commissioning the entire output of a nuclear reactor to get enough power for their AI plans. That's one big power bill, and so far most of the AI ventures are being heavily subsidized for their customers. They aren't paying what it actually costs to run AI because the AI companies are getting cash infusions from V-Cap. But the V-Cap outfits are starting to ask uncomfortable questions like "so uh, when does the profit start?" Once those questions become more insistent, it's inevitable that users of AI systems are going to end up getting charged at a level that can generate a profit, which is a whole lot more than they were getting charged at first.

 

Thankfully I am locked in but agree it has bloated itself beyond offering just ATC, most of the other stuff I don't need (want)

I ask myself, what if you paid real people to do this instead.

Gregg

2 minutes ago, Gregg_Seipp said:

I ask myself, what if you paid real people to do this instead.

Gregg

Then you'd have "Pilot Edge" and it would cost you 20 bucks a month.

It is strange to me that Brian seems a very intelligent, innovative guy, yet so many cutomers are saying the same thing.... "I don't want mentors, I don't want a tour guide, I don't want 'two tone murphy' in my cockpit.....  I want robust ATC".

Why is he not listening?       It's like self-indulgence.  "Because I can do this, I'm going to".

As a user of SI since day 1, I do value it and use it on every flight.   but I hate how it's descended into 'celebrity' culture, with these "[funny]" (as they are marked in SI) voice packs.   I'm not flight simming to have some minor YouTube ego trying to be funny in my ear.

I've also noticed some other disappointing changes too;   some silly voices for example. In the UK, if you ask for IFR clearance, you now get a grumpy, aggressive ATC say "OK... GIVE ME MINUTE!", every single time.   It feels very gamey.

Yesterday I was flying in the US and 4 controllers in a row said "Hi Pilot" when I contacted them.   Have you ever heard an ATC say "Hi Pilot" ??   Why does he add silly, unrealistics gimmicks to a product whose core offering is realism? 

I've been a big supporter of SI but admit, I'm feeling disillusioned at the moment.  

All the mentors, tour guides and 'funny' stuff should have stayed with the Entourage product, and should not be integrated into SI Premium.

Edited October 10, 2025Oct 10 by JYW

23 minutes ago, JYW said:

It is strange to me that Brian seems a very intelligent, innovative guy, yet so many cutomers are saying the same thing.... "I don't want mentors, I don't want a tour guide, I don't want 'two tone murphy' in my cockpit.....  I want robust ATC".

Why is he not listening?       It's like self-indulgence.  "Because I can do this, I'm going to".

As a user of SI since day 1, I do value it and use it on every flight.   but I hate how it's descended into 'celebrity' culture, with these "[funny]" (as they are marked in SI) voice packs.   I'm not flight simming to have some minor YouTube ego trying to be funny in my ear.

I've also noticed some other disappointing changes too;   some silly voices for example. In the UK, if you ask for IFR clearance, you now get a grumpy, aggressive ATC say "OK... GIVE ME MINUTE!", every single time.   It feels very gamey.

Yesterday I was flying in the US and 4 controllers in a row said "Hi Pilot" when I contacted them.   Have you ever heard an ATC say "Hi Pilot" ??   Why does he add silly, unrealistics gimmicks to a product whose core offering is realism? 

I've been a big supporter of SI but admit, I'm feeling disillusioned at the moment.  

All the mentors, tour guides and 'funny' stuff should have stayed with the Entourage product, and should not be integrated into SI Premium.

At the moment I'm satisfied with SI, but if it starts becoming gamey, a gimmick, then we can let the market decide.

I doubt anyone but really serious flight simmers would even consider forking out 20 a month just for ATC. So if they drop the ball, we go back to FSHud, fairly simple.  

28 minutes ago, JYW said:

I've also noticed some other disappointing changes too;   some silly voices for example. In the UK, if you ask for IFR clearance, you now get a grumpy, aggressive ATC say "OK... GIVE ME MINUTE!", every single time.   It feels very gamey.

Yesterday I was flying in the US and 4 controllers in a row said "Hi Pilot" when I contacted them.   Have you ever heard an ATC say "Hi Pilot" ??   Why does he add silly, unrealistics gimmicks to a product whose core offering is realism? 

I've been a big supporter of SI but admit, I'm feeling disillusioned at the moment. 

Yes, this. 

Decided to test it for a month.

I already had the tour guide thing and I personally love it when I am flying VFR. So not everyone is against  the addons.

Only 2 flight so far.

Traffic injection seems limited so far. More testing to do do, but saw no planes during cruise or landing at KSFO.

I was hoping it would be close to FsHud for the traffic injection. ATC seems good.

Like I said more testing to do.

2 hours ago, JYW said:

It is strange to me that Brian seems a very intelligent, innovative guy, yet so many cutomers are saying the same thing.... "I don't want mentors, I don't want a tour guide, I don't want 'two tone murphy' in my cockpit.....  I want robust ATC".

...

 but I hate how it's descended into 'celebrity' culture, with these "[funny]" (as they are marked in SI) voice packs.   I'm not flight simming to have some minor YouTube ego trying to be funny in my ear.

All the mentors, tour guides and 'funny' stuff should have stayed with the Entourage product, and should not be integrated into SI Premium.

That's what I think too. I just care about a good ATC experience with traffic and both IFR/VFR. Would have been better probably to have two separate packages, one only "serious atc services", and the other with all the added perks at different prices (cabin crew, funny voices, tours and such stuff). But no, they added jurassic park missions! 

 

1 hour ago, ConairMSFS said:

That's what I think too. I just care about a good ATC experience with traffic and both IFR/VFR. Would have been better probably to have two separate packages, one only "serious atc services", and the other with all the added perks at different prices (cabin crew, funny voices, tours and such stuff). But no, they added jurassic park missions! 

 

Same for me. I'm only interested on a good ATC experience.

3 hours ago, Ron Lefebvre said:

Decided to test it for a month.

I kind of did the opposite. I deleted my SI account and finally bought the FSHud upgrade for MSFS 2024, mostly because it is on sale right now.

To be absolutely fair, they are incredibly active on the ATC improvement front with fixes being posted really frequently. I'd say there's almost daily improvements to really important issues. Like sequencing was improved massively, vectoring logic overhauled, D-ATIS implemented. There was also talk of pilot activated lighting coming soon.

90% of the team is working on core ATC. And a lot of what might considered fluff features were stepping stones on the way to traffic injection. For example the birds spawning if NOTAMs contain 'bird activity' was a way to test object spawning in the sim. Progressive taxi was a looking into ways of generating cohesive taxi pathfinding out of the existing data. 

To be clear, I don't really use a lot of the features like ground handling or copilot stuff. And yeah some of it seems silly - like the halloween flight crew. But I also totally get the team blowing off some steam on stuff they find interesting or cool once in a while.

 

EDIT: I'm a fan of the project and I followed it for a while. I do want to stress that absolutely there are issues and I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's bad experiences. In fact hey, I run into stuff all the time. There's awkwardness at the moment when you leave control zones and are meant to be switched to oceanic but aren't. That annoys me. I mentioned traffic density before, I think some flights are getting lost and therefore not being populated correctly. Or AI still not quite remembering requests correctly occasionally.

I've owned and used every major ATC program out there - FSHUD, Pilot2ATC, BATC. They all have their limitations and bugs. To me, SI is delivering the most natural and hassle-free experience of all of them. I'm rooting for these guys to eventually overcome as many of these issues as possible. But hey, totally admit it's not really for everyone and that's absolutely fine.  

 

Edited October 10, 2025Oct 10 by Georgleboui

There is a change log tab in the SI app, so you can easily see what they’re changing/fixing/adding daily

5 hours ago, JYW said:

It is strange to me that Brian seems a very intelligent, innovative guy, yet so many cutomers are saying the same thing.... "I don't want mentors, I don't want a tour guide, I don't want 'two tone murphy' in my cockpit.....  I want robust ATC".

Why is he not listening?       It's like self-indulgence.  "Because I can do this, I'm going to".

As a user of SI since day 1, I do value it and use it on every flight.   but I hate how it's descended into 'celebrity' culture, with these "[funny]" (as they are marked in SI) voice packs.   I'm not flight simming to have some minor YouTube ego trying to be funny in my ear.

I've also noticed some other disappointing changes too;   some silly voices for example. In the UK, if you ask for IFR clearance, you now get a grumpy, aggressive ATC say "OK... GIVE ME MINUTE!", every single time.   It feels very gamey.

Yesterday I was flying in the US and 4 controllers in a row said "Hi Pilot" when I contacted them.   Have you ever heard an ATC say "Hi Pilot" ??   Why does he add silly, unrealistics gimmicks to a product whose core offering is realism? 

I've been a big supporter of SI but admit, I'm feeling disillusioned at the moment.  

All the mentors, tour guides and 'funny' stuff should have stayed with the Entourage product, and should not be integrated into SI Premium.

At a guess, it'll be because they're not programming ATC, they're programming AI and telling it to pretend to be ATC using prompts and contexts. At some point, the 80/20 equation comes into play and the 20 part (which is exponentially more difficult to complete than the 80 because it demands better than an "approximation") is demanded by users. 

I'd argue that they need more money and more development time to complete the remaining 20% than they've spent so far doing the "approximation" of an ATC service they currently have. 

Good luck to them but they do keep saying "we'll never be perfect..." in their development stream. They know it's going to be hard - AI is not a magic bullet.

 

 

Edited October 10, 2025Oct 10 by FPVSteve