Flight Talker

Flight Talker is a specialized text-to-speech application that allows pilots to transfer complex flight plans from their iPad to a VoiceFlight enabled GNS430W/530W in a matter of seconds.

The waypoints and airways comprising the flight plan are selected and copied to the iPad Clipboard from the pilot's preferred flight planning application. When the Flight Talker App is launched (or returned to the foreground), the current contents of the iPad Clipboard are retrieved and displayed for review in a text window.

Entries which are not eligible for transcription are highlighted in red. This includes waypoint identifiers greater than five characters, identifiers comprised of only digits (e.g. an altitude specification), lower-case entries (such as "kts"), as well as identifiers containing non-AlphaNumeric characters (such as Latitude/Longitude specifications). Keyboard editing is available to adjust the flight plan as necessary.

Upon pressing the PLAY button, a three second countdown begins and the pilot is reminded to depress and hold the yoke mounted VoiceFlight Activation Switch (VAS). A custom audio cable, available from VoiceFlight Systems, transfers audio output from the iPad headphone jack to the aircraft's Pilot microphone jack. An iPad volume setting in the upper third is recommended for best results.

At the end of the countdown sequence, the application begins rapidly speaking the contents of the flight plan using the ICAO phonetic alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, ...). Each waypoint or airway identifier is followed by the word ENTER.

The content and pacing of the generated speech has been specifically designed to match the exceptional speed and accuracy of the VoiceFlight VFS101 speech recognition system.