Every announcement is generated separately for every language you pick, which makes the language choice the single biggest decision about how a flight sounds — and what it costs.
The four voices
| Voice | Languages | Where it runs | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local | English | your own computer | free |
| AI Lite | 47 | our servers | 100 characters per credit |
| Full AI | 32 natively | our servers | 40 characters per credit |
| Full AI, experimental | 44 more | our servers | 40 characters per credit, doubled |
| Off | — | — | free, nothing is spoken |
The local voice is what the Free plan uses. It runs inside the connector, needs no internet, costs nothing and never runs out — it just speaks English only and sounds like a synthesiser rather than a crew member.
You choose per announcement, not per flight. Nothing stops you giving the welcome and the farewell the full AI voice while everything routine runs on AI Lite. Settings → Voice quality per announcement pins the choice permanently so you are not re-picking it each flight.
Experimental languages
The full AI voice speaks 32 languages natively. A further 44 are produced by a heavier model, and those cost double per character.
The doubling applies to the whole flight, not just that language. The model is chosen once for the set of languages you picked, so adding one experimental language to an otherwise native set switches everything to the heavier model — every language on the flight then costs double. If you want that language, it is usually cheaper to run it on AI Lite, which speaks many of them at the normal rate and never doubles.
The wizard warns you before you commit to one.
Flight languages and airport languages are separate
This trips people up, so it is worth stating plainly: announcements made on board and announcements made in the terminal have their own language lists.
A flight from Prague to Barcelona can quite reasonably be announced in Czech and English on board, while the gate calls are in Catalan, Spanish and English. Setting one does not set the other.
How the languages get picked for you
When you dispatch a flight, the languages are proposed from the route: the language of the departure country, the language of the arrival country, and English. Some airports override that with what is actually spoken there rather than what the country code implies.
You can always override the proposal, and the order matters — the first language is the primary one, announced first.
Translation is free
Only speech costs credits. Writing the announcement text, adapting it to the flight, and translating it into your chosen languages are all free, no matter which voice you then use — including the translation into an experimental language.
So a second language costs you exactly one more generation of speech. Nothing else.
Names and places
Announcements pronounce city and airport names in the language being spoken, which is not always the name on the chart. Where a community translation exists, it is used; you can add your own under Settings → Translations, including in scripts other than Latin, and they also appear on the IFE map.