WHO BUILDS THIS
A small operation with a large amount of radio
SkyHeinz Pilot is founder-built, in collaboration with pilots, controllers and instructors who correct the transcripts, lend their voices and tell us where the grading is wrong. The aviation people are not decoration. They are the reason the speech recognition works on real radio instead of only on clean speech.
FOUNDER
Dominik Braun
Builds the speech recognition, the grading and the app. Started SkyHeinz after noticing that every aviation radio trainer on the market shared one weakness: none of them could reliably understand a student speaking under pressure. Runs the live transcription operation the training data comes from.
CONTRIBUTORS
Pilots and controllers
More than 10,000 corrections to machine transcripts have come from people who read radio for a living or are learning to. Every correction is a case the recognition previously got wrong, which is exactly the material a model needs and the material a competitor cannot buy.
VOICE DONORS
The accent problem, solved by people
Radio is not spoken in one accent. Volunteers recorded reference speech so the system could be trained against the range of voices a controller actually hears, rather than the narrow range a studio session produces.
INSTRUCTORS
The people who mark for a living
Flight instructors test the grading against their own judgement. When the app fails something an examiner would pass, or passes something an examiner would fail, that is a bug and it gets fixed. This is the loop that decides whether the app is worth anything.
WORK ON THIS WITH US
If you are a controller, a pilot or an instructor and you want the radio training in this industry to be better than it is, we want to hear from you. Particularly if you think our grading is wrong. Telling us where it fails is the most useful thing anyone can do.
GET IN TOUCHThe work behind the app: 685,000+ real transmissions transcribed live at Singapore Changi, improved by 10,000+ crowdsourced corrections. Visit the archive.