“Wait. Wait.” said the voice command.

A few seconds later “7.6.5.4.3.2.1. Walk sign is on to cross all directions”

I had forgotten about the push buttons at the junction of major streets and the voice commands that indicated when it was okay to cross the street. Some streets had one direction crossing while others had crossing in all directions at the same time. To improve pedestrian experience and provide a more walkable environment, cities have been implementing audible pedestrian buttons that enhances pedestrian safety and keeps traffic flowing.

“Stay in middle two lanes,” said another voice.

“Stay on the second lane and take the exit to the right. At the stop light make a left turn onto…”

Earlier in the day, I had punched in origin and destination into my phone map application. The car I was driving unfortunately did not have the free navigation feature, but these days most cars have moving map displays with navigation features that simplifies driving in new environments. Having voice activated directions is certainly handy to avoid distractions while driving. The directions were so precise, especially telling me which lane to stay in on 5-6 lane highway, was quite interesting. I wondered again, how is this achieved?

So, I typed the question in Google, of course, and here’s the response I got:

Eons ago, I had done a cross country driving trip coast to coast. Those days this necessitated a visit to my local auto insurance agent and picking up all the in between state maps, hours of poring over them and picking the routes I wanted to take, where to stop, how long it would take and innumerable hours spent planning the trip. Nowadays, all that is needed is a map app and we are good to go.

This also reminded me of how navigation for my flight planning has also slowly evolved. During the early days of my flight training, I flew aircraft with limited avionics which meant I needed aeronautical charts – sectional, terminal, VFR, IFR, airport diagrams, plotters, rulers and so on. I spent hours plotting, calculating, and planning my cross-country flights. Since then, not only cockpit avionics have technologically advanced but also the arrival of digital apps such as Foreflight has simplified flight planning and reduced the need for paper charts. Instead, it is now possible to have digital charts all on your phone or iPad.

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system is used for this purpose and can be implemented in software or hardware products. The earliest known device to mimic human speech was constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen over 200 years ago. Advances in speech synthesis means that in the near future the conversational partner might be a machine, not another human. This is already very evident in the virtual assistants already prevalent in our daily lives such as Alexa, Siri, and others. Most often, customer service calls are responded by virtual assistants and it is already becoming difficult to reach a human operator in our day-to-day encounters.

I can almost see a day not too far in the distance, when I will punch in my origin and destination in my avionics panel, depart from the airport following the direction of automation that will tell me the heading and altitude, and any necessary corrections to follow the flight plan without me having to either track a radial to a VOR or keep checking my panel to see the deviation of the actual path from the planned path.

In fact, one day in the not-too-distant future, the aircraft will fly itself. No voice commands needed.

That day is not far, whether we are ready for it or not.