Re: [Flightgear-devel] That blaring voice...

[Joshua M. <fli...@jo...>]

I strongly agree with Josh. The TTS voice is extremely grating, and unfortunately it has aged extremely poorly as well given the advancements in TTS quality over the last number of years. I never understood why a voice was ever used in these situations? All other directives to the users are in written form, except for the infamous "welcome aboard" and "replay stopped, your controls" messages.

It's also particularly hard on the ears when you spawn in at an airport and immediately you are hit with overlapping voices from both AI aircraft, the ATC tower talking to other AI traffic (and immediately granting you takeoff clearance sometimes, depending on the situation/airport?) and the welcome message. If it's a heavy traffic area, you may have several overlapping voices occurring all within the first few seconds while you're still cold and dark.

It makes sense for emulating a human voice over the radio, even if it does make ones ears bleed. But I think as Josh said, disabling it in non-radio contexts would be beneficial, and additionally I would add having tighter timings on when TTS voices are allowed to chime in. If you're listening to two separate radios, overlapping voices are to be expected. But if you're plane is powered down, one TTS voice is too many.

All the best,
Joshua

On Sunday, September 29th, 2024 at 7:58 PM, Josh Davidson <jos...@ou...> wrote:

> Hi,
> I really need to ask about this, because I DON'T understand.
>
> When starting FG for the first time, users are presented with this quite harsh voice "Welc-hum ab-hard, need h-elp, use h-elp tutor-heals"
>
> It's quite jarring.
>
> And then, the ATIS starts blaring in this same harsh voice...
>
> Can someone help me understand this decision? I find it to be quite a turn off, and I imagine a new user would be frantically clicking around trying to figure out how to make the blare stop.
>
> Because, in the real plane, we do not just leave ATIS blaring. It's distracting. That radio with ATIS tuned is either muted or tuned elsewhere until we need ATIS, then we tune, get ATIS, and untune.
>
> I would propose that we maybe address this for 2024.1:
>
> -  Disabling this blaring voice on startup - there's already the message, who needs it?
> -  Keeping the second comm radio muted by default (then auto-tuning the freq is ok and can be useful).
>
> -  There is no sense in having an ATIS tuned radio blaring.
>
> Hope to hear your thoughts,
>
> Bests,
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> --
> Josh Davidson