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Ravi Lingineni

Published Apr 20, 2019

Pilot Talk

Use Alexa to speak on the radios to ATC

This was an Alexa Skill I built when I was a student pilot and was struggling to talk on the radios.

You can speak to Alexa as if you’re a pilot and requesting to take off or land and ATC will respond. Under the hood is a finite state machine that handles the voice and actions that come as a result.

The main challenge was getting the Alexa Skill to parse the pilot commands correctly, because there’s quite a bit of information when pilots communicate with the tower.

It won the Grand Prize for AWS Educate challenge.

You can read more about the technical details and problem space in two places:

  1. My Project Submission Page

  2. AWS Educate Winners Blog Post