I saw this Dynamic Virtual Co-Pilot addon on .to last week, and have been playing with it for a few days. I find it quite useful, especially for VR, and thought it deserves more attention.
https://flightsim.to/file/54766/dyna...for-checklists

The addon is a profile for a gaming app called VoiceAttack. VoiceAttack's main use, as its name suggests, is for gamers to execute timed series of commands, such as attacks, triggered by a voice macro. It uses voice recognition to execute one or more key presses and mouse actions. In addition, it also can play sounds and talk back to you using text-to-speech. The app costs $10.

The addon uses VoiceAttack's talk-back feature to go through checklists. It reads you checklist items from a text file, and listens for you to say either "check", "repeat", or "exit checklist". "Check" makes it move on and read the next item; "repeat" repeats the last item; "exit checklist" aborts the list. You have total control over the items and the phrasing of the items in the checklist. You can do different checklists for each phase of flight and different sets of checklists (profiles) for each of your planes. I generally have 6 checklists per plane, (1) "start" (preflight through beginning of taxi), (2) "takeoff" (hold short through initial climb), (3) "cruise", (4) "approach" (initial descent through final) (5) "rollout" (vacating runway through parking), and (6) "shut down".

The first benefit of this addon is that it is more immersive than using the toolbar checklist. It is cool to have a human voice reading your checklist items out to you, even in a single-seat plane (where I guess it's your "inner dialogue").

An even bigger benefit is the customization. I can conform the checklist more closely to the real POH or procedures, add items such as checking in with the Vatsim controller that are not in normal checklists, omit items that I consider non-functional busy work, have it remind me of reference speeds like the gear and flap limit speeds for the particular aircraft during the approach, etc., etc., etc.

You can also use the key macro functionality that is VoiceAttack's original purpose, alongside the checklists. This is especially handy for VR users. I have created the following global actions, for example:
- Saying "escape" presses the escape key, which allows me to exit a flight in VR without groping for the keyboard.
- Saying "what time is it" makes the computer tell me the current real-world time. Handy because when immersed in VR, I can't check my watch and often lose track of time, making me late for dinner, bedtime, work, child's graduation/wedding, and other events.
- When doing the weight and balance, I often empty the payload of my plane and just fly with a pilot or two. I go into the weight-and-balance screen, set the slider to zero, and can now restore just the pilot weights by clicking on those fields and saying "Pilot weight", and the macro types in the value 170 and presses enter. Or, if I just want to empty specific payload stations, I select them, say "empty station" and the macro types a 0 and enter.
- Any airplane commands that can be entered through the keyboard that I would order my co-pilot to do in a specific airplane, I can create a macro for him to do and repeat back to me.

To save the trouble of doing custom profiles for hundreds of different planes, I have created generic profiles for categories like Single Engine Piston that are good enough most of the time. Planes with funky procedures like the An-2 require their own custom profiles, and I'll get around to doing them for most of the planes that I fly often.

This addon does not read or write any values to the simulator and therefore is sim-independent. It works equally well in MSFS, P3D, X-Plane, FSX, FS9, IL2, DCS, CFS2, or Aces Over Europe if you want. It also does not need Simconnect, so it does not interfere with Vatsim, My FS Flights, or other apps that interact with the sim. You can walk though all of the checklists with no sim running at all, which is handy for testing.

There is another VoiceAttack profile, https://flightsim.to/file/5247/msfs-...r-voice-attack, which uses Simconnect and reads and writes values to the simulator. I'm playing with this as well, and it has additional capabilities like performing operations that can't be done through the keyboard, like setting the radios to a specific frequency. But I am not sure that the extra functionality is worth the communications overhead and the fact that it will only work with MSFS.

Anyway, I'd encourage you all to try this out, especially with VR. I think I might be able to come up with instructions for how to use this on the free demo version of VoiceAttack if you want to try it out without buying the app.

August