About Digital Race Engineer
Digital Race Engineer is built around your ears rather than a HUD: instead of a telemetry overlay you read mid-corner, it delivers a steady stream of spoken calls and audio signals. That covers a 3D-positioned spotter, automatic fuel and pit strategy, tire wear, weather and its SpraySense rain-proximity warnings, and coaching cues like the Delta Wave delta-time audio signal and a braking-overlap cue. It ships with around 50 alerts and hundreds of voice commands, and voice quality scales with the tier you pick, with the best neural voice quality reserved for the paid plans.
In practice it runs as a background Windows app (Windows 7 or newer, .NET 4.8) that reads each sim's telemetry while you drive. A microphone is optional and only needed for the spoken voice commands, so you can run DRE for its calls and alerts without one. Feature depth follows the sim, with iRacing getting the full command set and ACC, Assetto Corsa and Le Mans Ultimate covered for the subset of features they share with it; Assetto Corsa Evo is listed as coming soon.
It's aimed at racers who want race-day radio chatter, spotter awareness and strategy without a human engineer on the pit wall, and the permanent free tier already covers a large slice of that before any subscription. Unlike Crew Chief, which is free and open source with pre-recorded voices, DRE leans on synthesized text-to-speech voices, a large voice-command set and a freemium model with paid tiers. Because it's a companion process that needs to be running before you get on track, it fits a SimLauncher startup profile as a custom app that launches alongside the sim.