More local voices needed

[Guest abulaafia]

Radar Contact is a fantastic product, indeed. I am really happy with it, so happy that I venture to offer a suggestion to improve it in the future: :)I understand the limitations of such a basic artificial intelligence endeavour, but to increase realism you must in future versions include the ability to assign controllers to regions (and pilots to airlines, but that's less important). The current implementation offers pilot and controller voices which have a tendency to mispronounce every single place name not located in the US. It is asking a bit much, I know, but the fact that many places are not even recognizable by sound means that this

[Guest RickT]

Hi Marten,Did you send a request to audition to me rick@jdtllc.com? I can find no record of a request to record from you.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,945]

Hi Marten,We'd love to have a wide range of accents so that controller voices would match the country you were flying in but the problem is that it's a huge personal undertaking for someone to record a set and to stay with us for the long term when new phrases are needed.With RC4 there is a substantial increase in the number of British voice sets which is great when flying in the UK and we also have a South African and a Dane for the first time.Ultimately if we get no offers from French, German, Scandinavian or Chinese volunteers we can hardly send out the Press Gangs ;)So what's your French like? ;-)

[jd 57]

it's already coded. but the problem is, if there is only one french accent, are you going to be happy with the same controller from beginning to end? it's just as unrealistic as having a brit and an australian in the mixjd

[Guest mikelally]

Question for JD and the gang. A while back you looked for more volunteers to record voice tracks. Can we have an update on this. Were many accepted and how far along is the process now?Mike

[jd 57]

because of new phrases, airlines, airport names, etc, we have held off new recordings. as soon as we finalize the list, hopefully while i'm in memphis at the end of june, we'll start up again.rick has received some auditions, and we are working with them on their recording setupjd

[machie 1]

This is a bit off topic--but could we try to enlist some help in getting chatter from other places--like china airports and India and the pacific---some person could just sit at Honolulu airport and get great chatter as it is one of the best US airports for mixed airline and GA radio trafficCheersDorn

[jd 57]

as i said in another post, we're going to over time reduce the dependency on pre-recorded chatter. with new voices, the focus will be on ai chatterimho, the pre-recorded chatter is almost always wrong. referring to wrong runways, wrong pressures, wrong winds, weather, etc and wrong aircraft (that don't exist)ai chatter is always pertinent to where you are.jd

[machie 1]

Well yes----BUTYou have achieved real audio ART at this point--I am a real life pilot and I love all the real background chatter--it's like really flying---I have a big Apple 30 inch monitor and I get no end of fun showing non pilots what really happens on a flight say from SF to LAX---the AI all by itself will be too correct---it will be dry and just all computer---I don

[brucewtb 249]

I must say I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. I use a large set of real life atc chatter waves for Australian airspace and the comparison with what we get in RC4 is chalk and cheese. I turn off the AI chatter because it sounds so unrealistic. I understand the difficulty of manufacturing synthetic ATC voices for an addon like RC4 but I would really really would like a much better audio experience. Everything else about RC4 is excellent but the voices issue bugged me when I first downloaded the RC4 demo file and despite some progess with v4.01 still bugs me. One way things could be improved would be to record many more complete sentences rather than creating sentences from individually recorded words that often have quite different inflections. I realise this could greatly increase the size of RC but in IMHO it would be progress in the right direction.Bruceb

[Ray Proudfoot 8,945]

Hi Bruce,You might find this link useful in understanding how much effort Microsoft put in to produce the voices for FS9. http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimul...mbledvoices.aspUnfortunately RC doesn't have such resources so we do the best we can with what we're sent by enthusiasts who are prepared to record nearly 2000 wavs using modest equipment and without professional assistance.I have personally spent more hours than I care to remember trying to make these sounds as realistic as I can. Whilst they may not meet the standard of the Microsoft ones the procedures in RC leave the default ATC standing. Given time you should get used to our voice sets and enjoy a far greater level of realism than FS9 ATC can deliver.A word of advice... if you turn off Ai chatter you stand a very real chance of RC4 not recognising you and failing to clear you for take-off when you're holding short. It's imperative you keep that oprion selected.PS, we don't have any Australian voice sets ;-)Cheers,

[brucewtb 249]

Thanks for the link. I notice that the importance of tonal inflection is mentioned - is there no way this can be improved in RC? Perhaps you could also guide me on how to get the best audio out of v 4.01 as to my ears there is little improvement but others seem to feel that the change is substantial?Bruceb

[Ray Proudfoot 8,945]

Hi Bruce,<I'm not aware that it's that bad. Perhaps you could be more specific. Are there particular sets that are worse than others? Microsoft had everyone together in the same room and had the benefit of professional guidance. How I wish we had those luxuries. We provide guidance on how to get good recording levels but after that it's down to the person recording.I'm surprised you hear no improvement with 4.01. Have you used the sliders to adjust the space between each spoken word? Moving the slider to the right will increase that space; leaving at the left will keep the space to a minumum and is the default setting.Cheers,

[brucewtb 249]

Well it must be just my ears wearing out or something because I find that most phrases have words spoken with noticebly different inflection and it is that which makes the wav files so unrealistic. As for the sliders again it must be me but I find increasing the space between words makes thing less realistic so I thought perhaps I had got things wrong as to how v4.01 improved matters hence the query. But I will do some more experimenting. Well clearly I am flogging a dead horse here so I will see if the voices become an aquired taste over time - as I said previously the rest of RC is excellent. But in the longer term I think it is something RC will need to address, perhaps some genius will come up with a way of addressing the problem in a less resource intensive way than Microsoft has.Bruceb

[jd 57]

moving the sliders to the right, are supposed to make things slower, and possible more unrealistic. it is there for the people that think 4.01 is too fast. possible persons where english is not their primary language.by default all sliders are supposed to be to the far left.4.01 was supposed to fix the slow, some described robotic voices in 4.0 - that was succesful for the majority of people. some people like 4.0 better. jd