Wireless communications system and method

A speech-to-text (STT) avionics transcription system for transcribing radio frequency (RF) communications transmitted from and received on board an aircraft (AC), which system includes:

• a smart device configured for receiving said communications;
• said smart device including a display visible to aircrew;
• a STT program installed and running on said smart device, said program configured for converting said communications to digital text for display on said smart device;
• an radio communications device onboard said AC and configured for transmitting and receiving said RF communications;
• said radio communications device configured for selective connection to said smart device;
• an audio subsystem onboard said AC, connected to said radio communications device and configured for output of said communications to aircrew;
• said radio communications device and said smart device being interconnected via one of a hardwired or wireless connection;
• a Y-connector including a first connection to said radio communications device, a second connection to said AC audio subsystem and a third connection to said smart device;
• said radio communications device comprising a multiple-channel communications radio;
• and said multiple-channel communications radio is configured for monitoring:
• a primary communications channel for communicating with air traffic control (ATC) and other AC;
• and a secondary channel for weather and emergency communications;
• an automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) device onboard said AC and connected to said radio communications device;
• a machine learning cluster configured for training said STT functions, said machine learning cluster configured for receiving untrained model and training data input and providing trained model output;
• said system configured for aircrew accessing communications audibly and/or visually;
• said STT system including:
• cabin filtering, voice activity detection (VAD), feature extraction, inference-neural network (acoustic model), decoder language model and natural language processing;
• said STT system including:
• inference-neural network (acoustic model) receiving acoustic model inference processing input;
• and a decoder (language model) receiving language model decoding input;
• a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) onboard said AC and configured for locating said AC;
• and
• and a database localization feature utilizing said GNSS-defined AC location.

A wireless communications method including the steps of:

• providing a smart device configured for receiving said communications;
• providing said smart device with a display visible to aircrew;
• and
• installing on said smart device an STT program and running on said smart device, said program configured for converting said communications to digital text for display on said smart device.

The method according to claim 19, which includes the additional steps of:

• providing a radio communications device selectively connected to said smart device;
• and
• optimizing performance of said wireless communications method using one or more of:
• localization techniques, aircraft identification in an avionics application, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning information.