A student at the Prague University of Economics and Business has
invented a new speech-to-text system that can help small airports and
small aircraft to communicate better. The system has now caught the
attention of pilots, airports and even the Czech Civil Aviation
Authority.
[1]Photo: Jitka Slezáková, Czech Radio
Photo: Jitka Slezáková, Czech Radio
If you were piloting a plane, thousands of metres up in the air, you
might not want to have to take down notes with a pencil and paper. Yet
this is typical for important information transmitted in the NATO
phonetic alphabet between small aircraft and small airports. To keep
track of the skies, local and hobbyist airports are in constant
communication over simple analogue radio with the pilots in their
operating zones. Pilot David Muschalik, who works as an operator for a
small flying club, explains why:
“When an aircraft enters into an airport's operating zone, it is
necessary for us to remember or write down, for example, the aircraft's
call sign, altitude, aircraft type, and the pilot's position and
intention – that is, where they are and whether they plan to land. This
information is then passed on by the operator to other aircraft flying
into the operating zone.”
However, an alternative means of communication is starting to take off
in Czechia. This system comes not from aviation professionals, but
rather from the thesis of Michal Marhan, a recent graduate of the
University of Economics and Business in Prague. In this final-year
dissertation, Mr. Marhan proposed a way to turn complex radio
transmissions into easily readable text in a few seconds. Since these
spoken transmissions tend to be quite formulaic and repetitive, he
trained AI to work with aviation terminology:
“The advantage that helped me is that aviation phraseology is given. It
has a certain structure. Although pilots can of course deviate from it
a little, change the order, or say something a little differently, they
actually use a limited vocabulary, which also helps with accuracy.”
[2]Michal Marhan's app that won IT Student Project of the Year | Photo:
Eva Kézrová, Czech Radio
Michal Marhan's app that won IT Student Project of the Year|Photo: Eva
Kézrová, Czech Radio
Mr. Marhan describes how the system looks:
“Now, if I click on it and have what I said transcribed, it's basically
instant. I'm still on a mobile connection here, so it may not be
extremely fast, but you saw that it was basically within one second …
Now they'll try to extract the important information from the
recording. I'll simply click on the second button and here we actually
see within half a second ‘OKHIC’, instead of the words ‘Oscar Kilo
Hotel India Charlie’. This is the information that the system works
with, for example in calculating the occupancy of an airport.”
The system has benefits for both pilots in the sky and air traffic
controllers down on the ground. The improved speed of the incoming
information will allow pilots to make quicker decisions about where
they want to land, while airports will be able to record their
communications and collect fees more easily. With this project, Michal
Marhan won the IT SPY competition (IT Student Project of the Year) for
student theses in 2024, and, thanks to the 2,000 euro prize money, is
preparing a pilot run of the application at several small airports. The
Czech national Civil Aviation Authority is watching the project with
interest.
References
1.
https://english.radio.cz/sites/default/files/styles/rcz_lightbox_v2/public/images/d5793310467dc428c90275aecafa6fcd.jpg?itok=iN8iAnWi×tamp=1738068772
2.
https://english.radio.cz/sites/default/files/styles/rcz_lightbox_v2/public/images/593fe0ff62f8dec96b1fd3f01a8b389a.jpg?itok=lgMloL3e×tamp=1738068772
