Thanks for that. It must be exciting to be applying software skills to aviation. Life goals!
To me, speech to text and back seems like an incremental solution, but the holy grail would be the ability to symbolically encode the meaning of the words and translate to and from that meaning. People' phraseology varies wildly (even though it often shouldn't). For example, if I'm requesting VFR flight following, I can do it many different ways, and give the information ATC needs in any order. A system that can convert my words to "NorCal Approach Skyhawk one two three sierra papa is a Cessna one seventy two slant golf, ten north-east of Stockton, four thousand three hundred climbing six thousand five hundred requesting flight following to Palo Alto at six thousand five hundred," is nice, but wouldn't it be amazing if it could translate that audio into structured data:
...for ingestion into potentially other digital-only analysis systems. You could structure all sorts of routine and non-routine requests like this, and check them for completeness, use it for training later, and so on. Maybe one day, display it in real time on ATC's terminal and in the pilot's EFIS. With structured data, you could associate people's spoken tail numbers with info broadcast over ADS-B and match them up in real time, too. I don't know, maybe this already exists and I just re-invented something that's already 20 years old, no idea. IMO there's lots of innovation possible bringing VHF transmissions into the digital world!
Kidding aside, yes, you're exactly right. We're already doing this to a large degree and getting better. Lots of our own data labeling and model training to make this good.
To me, speech to text and back seems like an incremental solution, but the holy grail would be the ability to symbolically encode the meaning of the words and translate to and from that meaning. People' phraseology varies wildly (even though it often shouldn't). For example, if I'm requesting VFR flight following, I can do it many different ways, and give the information ATC needs in any order. A system that can convert my words to "NorCal Approach Skyhawk one two three sierra papa is a Cessna one seventy two slant golf, ten north-east of Stockton, four thousand three hundred climbing six thousand five hundred requesting flight following to Palo Alto at six thousand five hundred," is nice, but wouldn't it be amazing if it could translate that audio into structured data:
...for ingestion into potentially other digital-only analysis systems. You could structure all sorts of routine and non-routine requests like this, and check them for completeness, use it for training later, and so on. Maybe one day, display it in real time on ATC's terminal and in the pilot's EFIS. With structured data, you could associate people's spoken tail numbers with info broadcast over ADS-B and match them up in real time, too. I don't know, maybe this already exists and I just re-invented something that's already 20 years old, no idea. IMO there's lots of innovation possible bringing VHF transmissions into the digital world!