Everyone can talk, and talk beautifully. But when it actually comes down to the grinding gears of specific government procurement negotiations, things naturally cannot go that smoothly.
However, it wasn't Nick's turn to step directly into the crosshairs; the senior executives from the Aerospace Industries Corporation were there to handle the heavy lifting. Nick and his enterprise team were merely the architects providing the foundational system framework, while the military and the Aerospace Industries Corporation were the ones presiding over the prime contract for the system's research and development. Therefore, they were naturally far more anxious than Nick about how to aggressively secure the lion's share of the budgetary benefits.
Of course, no matter how the bureaucratic chips fell, Nick's corporate slice of the pie would definitely not be missing. On one hand, it was because Nick and his team played a decisive, foundational role in the engineering development of this Intelligent Voice Assistance System; it would be legally and politically unjustifiable to freeze them out of the upside. On the other hand, Nick and his team still held the proprietary keys to the relevant core technology. Before fully reverse-engineering or understanding the source code in their hands, it was practically impossible for the other stakeholders to turn against them.
Furthermore, this Intelligent Voice Assistance System had been listed by federal oversight as a premier model for military-civilian integration demonstration projects, so the prime contractors weren't about to take such a massive legal risk to overreach or breach their contracts here. Moreover, Nick and his tech firm had always cooperated closely with the Pentagon and the Aerospace Industries Corporation, and there were dozens of subsequent advanced defense projects already lined up to collaborate on, so the board wasn't going to do anything shortsighted to damage the lucrative cooperative relationship between the two parties.
Of course, a multi-million-dollar defense project of this magnitude has never been settled in a single afternoon negotiation. Especially since it involved a massive web of profit distribution and intellectual property licensing, it required a long, meticulous, and often exhausting negotiation process.
The leaders of both sides were currently only conducting preliminary contact and high-level consultations to hammer out a general framework agreement. They would subsequently hand the dossiers over to professional contract negotiation teams from both sides to conduct more detailed legal consultations and grueling discussions within that established framework.
After a lively celebratory base banquet, Director Steve took his FAA team and bid farewell to the installation. Nick and his core group then pivoted immediately to the main conference room to hold a specialized technical seminar on the telemetry data captured during this morning's live-flight test.
Although Nick was not directly involved in the day-to-day coding work of the entire Intelligent Voice Assistance System, he was officially designated as the deputy chief designer of this project, so it was only right for him to participate in this specialized technical seminar. Furthermore, the R&D software team, the active flight test crew, and General Luo all explicitly wanted him to remain in the room and participate in this specialized session.
To say who among the defense minds present knew the underlying mechanics of the intelligent voice system best, that would be Nick. Moreover, only Nick himself possessed the foundational core code and related proprietary technology for the entire software ecosystem, so the project R&D team naturally didn't want to miss this rare opportunity to pick his brain.
"Right here, when I was pulling hard into those high-alpha, high-G defensive maneuvers, the audio broadcast experienced a severe latency spike and simply couldn't keep up with my physical inputs," Jeyce said to the room, pointing a laser at the telemetry streams flashing across the large main display.
While he was breaking down the cockpit experience, a secondary large screen displayed the real-time processing and operational monitoring status of the Intelligent Voice Assistance System at that exact millisecond of the flight profile.
Sebastian, adjusting his glasses, glanced around the table and then pointed at a data cluster with a ballpoint pen, explaining, "From this hardware log, it's glaringly evident that during this specific high-alpha maneuver, a massive surge of instantaneous telemetry data was generated by the avionics bus all at once. Therefore, the system architecture required too many clock cycles to process this data dump, which directly resulted in the auditory latency."
"If that's the baseline capability, then this software might not be able to play much of a survival role in actual air combat. Because in a real dogfight, there are far too many critical engagement windows involving extreme high-maneuverability, high-alpha turns that push the physical limits of both the pilot and the airframe to the absolute edge."
"And ironically, it's precisely during these high-stress moments that aviators have a much greater operational need for zero-latency, real-time information, which can dramatically enhance tactical combat capability," said the other test pilot, Harry, who had sat on backup duty for today's flight test mission.
"Exactly. If this processing bottleneck isn't solved, then this system can only be reduced to an ordinary, glorified voice prompt system, and its tactical value to the Air Force will be greatly diminished," Sebastian said, turning his head to look directly at Nick.
Following Sebastian's gaze, every engineer and officer around the conference table also turned their eyes toward him.
Seeing the collective expectation of the room, Nick gave a slight, bitter smile and then gestured to the technician controlling the main terminal, "Open up the instantaneous avionics data packet list for the aircraft during those high-maneuverability, high-alpha movements for me, please."
Although he didn't know exactly what Nick was trying to isolate, the tech analyst quickly pulled up the entire software interface and displayed the dense array of data logs across the main screen.
Looking at the dense rows of binary code and telemetry metrics on the display, Sebastian spoke up: "A grand total of two hundred and thirty-seven separate data line items were generated instantaneously across the bus, covering every mechanical aspect of the entire aircraft—including the fly-by-wire flight control system, hydraulic oil pressure, cockpit air pressure, airspeed sensors, thrust vectoring nozzles, and so on."
Subsequently, the system filtered out the seven highest priority items for voice broadcasting.
The Intelligent Voice Assistance System can only transmit processed data information through the audio channel. Although it completely frees up the pilot's eyes to look outside the canopy, voice data transmission is fundamentally not as rapid, intuitive, or comprehensive as a pilot instantly sweeping a massive block of flight data with their eyes across a digital heads-up display.
"Yeah, I was getting a bit anxious up there with the delay, so I couldn't help but drop my eyes to look down at the physical instruments anyway," Jeyce nodded in agreement.
Nick made a quick pen mark in his notebook on the table and then addressed the room, "There are dozens of engineering reasons for the latency spike. I won't rehash the hardware constraints, the legacy flight control system limits, or the polling rates of the various sensors."
"I'll focus strictly on the software architecture issues within the Intelligent Voice Assistance System itself. First and foremost, the data payload processing of the entire system is somewhat bloated and redundant."
"This raw telemetry, or rather the unrefined information transmitted from the fly-by-wire system and various hardware sensors, can be completely replaced with optimized short-hand hex codes. After our system identifies, filters, and processes this inbound code information, it can instantly map it to pre-cached, pre-edited relevant voice broadcast strings."
"You guys were designing this with a very comprehensive mindset, wanting the pilot to obtain the absolute most detailed data possible, but you completely ignored the physical computational throughput speed of the onboard processor."
"So, mathematically, there are only two paths to solve this bottleneck. One is to convince the Pentagon to upgrade the avionics processor performance to improve raw computational efficiency. The second is to drastically streamline this information payload and make it sufficiently concise."
"Although streamlining the data will slightly increase the initial cognitive burden of reception and rapid understanding for the aviators, through simple tactical training, the pilots can learn to interpret these abbreviated audio messages much faster. This change will drastically reduce the overall software latency and maximize broadcasting efficiency."
"This is completely feasible from a training standpoint. Our squadrons already undergo intense cognitive memory training, so memorizing several dozen or even a hundred optimized tactical audio codes is absolutely no problem for us," Jeyce nodded rapidly in response.
Nick shook his head with a slight smile. "Actually, there's zero need to memorize these codes by rote like a textbook. We are building an Intelligent Voice Assistance System, so let's actually utilize its adaptive functions. By using short, razor-sharp military phrases instead, not only is the audio duration roughly the same, but it's significantly clearer and more direct. It's also far easier for active pilots to instinctively digest under G-load and reduces their overall mental burden."
"Of course, what I'm proposing is strictly an override for extreme, high-G tactical circumstances; in normal cruise flight environments, there's absolutely no need for this compressed mode."
"Nicholas' architectural approach is exceptionally sharp. I think we can immediately draft an engineering change order to test it out in this direction."
Sebastian first nodded in firm affirmation of Nick's optimization plan, then leaned across the table toward him, "President Nicholas, regarding the simplified data parsing and core processing of the system data arrays, I'm afraid my engineering team is going to need you to put in some serious hours with us to map out the code."
To this, Nick waved his hand dismissively and said, "Don't sweat it, Sebastian. This is exactly what we signed up for."