TTS: Regional or state-level pronunciation
TTS pronunciation of cities and roads needs to have more granular control as words may be pronounced differently in various regions of a country.
Nate Imparato
shared this idea
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Hallenbach commented
In Germany we have several dialects in our states. This causes the very similar problem that the same verbal syllable is pronounced different in the affected states.
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Jakflash commented
Constantly dealing with comments on mispronouncing streets and cities.
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whathappened15
commented
As others have mentioned, the current system involves choosing which userbase to give correct pronunciation to, and thus which other user base(s) to deliberately give mispronunciations to. We choose to pronounce Houston the way the Texans say it (Hue-stun) and ignore the way it is commonly pronounced across the southeast (How-stun).
There are many more:
Lafayette: Lay-fah-yet vs Luh-fay-it
Santa Fe: Santa Fay vs Santa Fee
Louisville: Louie-vull vs Louis-ville
Countless other variants of -vull vs -ville -
Anonymous commented
Since we cannot get non-US voices to handle proper pronunciation, the US-voices alone would help a country the size of Europe with as many accents in the US as Europe has languages.
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rocketsciguy
commented
Yes! My state needs to have "-ville" cities pronounced as "-vihl" not "-vuhl"; we don't live in the southeast! We also have a peculiar pattern for pronouncing certain 5 digit number streets, and there's no way I'd be able to have that implemented if it had to be countrywide.
I also would love to see overridden pronunciation being used for nearly all TTS in the app, not just turn instructions, so destinations are also pronounced correctly, and the "Let's take ... and ..." route descriptions at the beginning of a drive also use those overrides.
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Kartografer commented
Yes, this would really differentiate Waze from other navigation solutions.
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Matt commented
Being that I got shot down pretty ******* this one in the past, I'm happy to see this getting some much-needed attention.
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John M
commented
Most definitely. Currently, with Waze providing wrong pronunciations in certain states, some drivers will find it harder to trust the app.
As @karlcr9911 stated, Houston is a big one.
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Machete808 commented
Languages that are dominant in one state or another have letter combinations that are pronounced differently.
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karlcr9911 commented
Yes, would love to see more attention around this due to the regional, state-level pronunciation of street names & cities -- Houston, for example...Hue-stun vs How-stun.