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Text-to-speech systems have been expanding abbreviations for decades, and it always backfires in some cases. For example, DECtalk would expand "Sun" to "Sunday"
by mwcampbell 10y ago
Text-to-speech systems have been expanding abbreviations for decades, and it always backfires in some cases. For example, DECtalk would expand "Sun" to "Sunday" regardless of context, with the humorous result that blind people reading tech news in the 90s would often hear about Sunday Microsystems.
Edit: Yes, that example was unfair, because it's from the 90s (and actually, DECtalk was largely unchanged since the 80s, until it was ruined in the late 90s). Here's a somewhat more recent one: With the ETI-Eloquence engine, which was last updated in 2002, the string "2 Marketing" (which one might find, say, in a Wikipedia table of contents) is expanded to "March twond keting".
- splike 10y agoHence the need for intelligence
- revelation 10y agoWhich it fails miserably at. They probably picked the one example that worked. Someone linked another example here: https://soundcloud.com/zack-bloom/amazons-new-text-to-speech-api https://soundcloud.com/zack-bloom/amazons-new-text-to-speech... And it pronounces 1970s (the decade) as one-thousand-nine-hundred-seven-ths.
- PaulRobinson 10y agoYou're not wrong, but that's still the best real-time TTS sample I've ever heard.
- mwcampbell 10y agoOne blind guy I know opined in the late 90s that it's better to let the brain do the interpreting. But I understand that expansion of abbreviations makes TTS more attractive for mainstream applications.
- hosh 10y agoI was looking around for samples, and this is the only sample I have heard so far. I think that sounds pretty good. The emotional tone is off, but it is a lot better than say, Siri (which I understand was designed to sound robotic to highlight the tech). But I'm also the guy who has had my MBP announce the hour and it has freaked out coworkers. I don't know if this is crossing into uncanny valley territory. I think some of this is not being used to it. Google Map's driving voice sounds subtly better than that voice sample. I'm looking forward to seeing if a similar service is coming for GCP.
- kalleboo 10y agoI know a guy who's abbreviated middle name consistently gets pronounced as "street"