I had a hardware idea. We know of course of 3dr Mavlink radios... What if 3dr had a ‘pro’ version or ‘MavTalk’ version. The idea is to make the ground side radio slightly bigger with a speaker and the hardware necessary to verbally communicate messages from the pixhawk just like a typical GCS does. It could simply be velcro’d to the flyers TX or simply hang from a small strap around his / her neck. This way it could inform the flyer of things like battery level, altitude, gps count etc. It could run on a small lipo or maybe even a 9v battery. I don’t know how realistic the idea is but if so it would create another layer of safety for the flyer without the expense and complication sometimes associated with tablets, phones, or pc’s needed for a full fledged GCS set up in the field. aka OTG cables dangling from your $500 phone etc
The trick would be to get the code necessary for the ‘MavTalk’ radio to screen out all data except the verbal messages. I guess there would also have to be a way for the radio to inform the pixhawk of it’s presence [ or select this option during firmware install / copter set up in MP ] and then perhaps run a preloaded script in the copter firmware specifically for this that gives the desired messages in both specificity and durations.
Would this be possible? Worthwhile? The mavlinbk radios are cheap and light and have great range so it seems they could be utilized for something like this.
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If you haven't seen it already, check out:
http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/amp-to-frsky-x8r-sport-converter
It's a very small, cheap and neat solution that kind of achieves the same thing, except it converts mavlink to frsky. The advantage is that its runs over the existing 2.4ghz rc link and displays and speaks the data through your tx which is incredibly convenient while you're flying, much better than having to plug a usb dongle into a tablet and hold it separately. 3dr has done a very similar thing with the new solo controller.
Something like a 3DR radio + Raspberry Pi + speaker + MAVProxy would give you a quick and cheap solution to this.
If you're wanting to scale it down further, perhaps a 3DR radio + small Arduino + text-to-speech chip would work.
In terms of sorting out the verbal messages, check out the source code of Mission Planner, APM Planner or MAVProxy - they've all got text-to-speech functionality for the telemetry from an APM.