The app is an electronic flight bag (EFB) that includes Visual Flight Rules maps, geo-referenced approach plates, a terrain awareness and warning system and an attitude and heading reference system.

Aside from typical EFB features, Stratus Insight also provides air traffic control (ATC) radio transcription and playback, a vertical weather profile, radar forecast and smart flight plan.

Speech recognition, translation and transcription are part of the package. While they are common features around the world, ATC communications present many challenges for these common speech recognition systems. The high rate of speech, noisy signal and unique location identifiers are among those challenges. Appareo customized these recognition technologies for the aviation industry.

“We began by designing a deep neural network and training it on thousands of hours of speech and hundreds of hours of ATC data,” said Josh Gelinske, AI Systems Director at Appareo. “Natural Language Processing is also used to interpret the output of the speech recognition system, to present it in a more pilot-friendly format. For example, tail numbers, altitudes, runways, and frequencies are transcribed in a way that will be more helpful to pilots.”

Stratus Insight is one of two apps in the Stratus family of pilot-friendly affordable avionics. The other app is Stratus Horizon Pro, which was the industry’s first app to provide ATC radio transcription.

Gelinske said: “We are focused on developing machine learning technology to reduce workload and increase safety in the cockpit.”