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My dad is a native English speaker living in Italy. When he uses Google maps navigation while driving, the robo-voice absolutely butchers the pronunciation of s
by okhan 7y ago
My dad is a native English speaker living in Italy. When he uses Google maps navigation while driving, the robo-voice absolutely butchers the pronunciation of street names, towns, everything. You'd think the software would be smart enough to use the local language instead of the phone's locale for such things. More than half of the world's population speaks more than one language - we need to get better at building software that accounts for that.
- amingilani 7y agoAs a Pakistani living in Pakistan, I second this. Navigation butchers road names. What's worse is that I have to butcher the names myself, just so that Google Assistant would understand my voice, and start navigation when I'm driving.
- mc32 7y agoDoes it do the same for people visiting the US? I can imagine tons of butchering especially with placenames which have Native American derivation. Arkansas, Puyallup, Potowomut, or even idiosyncratic places like Peabody \’pee’bdee\
- bsimpson 7y agoA friend and former flatmate of mine split his childhood between the US and Mexico; he has native accents in both languages. It's wild to hear him phoning home, rattling off Spanish words faster than I can discern them, and then use a local pronunciation (and American accent) for Spanish-origin names like Divisadero or Arguello.
- personlurking 7y agoIn Puerto Rico it sure does a lot of butchering, after having taken Ubers there
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoThere is a city in Texas named Amarillo. What is the "correct" pronunciation of that city name - the Spanish way of pronouncing the word, or the way the locals say it?
- tyingq 7y agoWorcester, Massachusetts is also interesting, in a different way. The locals say it right, but anyone not familiar gets it wrong. Or maybe UK folks get it right?
- barneygale 7y agoUK pronunciation is two syllables "WUSS-tar", and most people here get it right because Worcester Sauce is a big thing.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoWorcestershire sauce ("wiss-ta-shirr") is a thing in the US too, though not Worcester sauce.
- adrianN 7y agoDo you mean Warchestersauce? Sponsored by Blizzard?
- thaumasiotes 7y agoNo?
- swish_bob 7y agoExcept it's still mostly pronounced WUSS-ter sauce in the UK.
- chrisseaton 7y agoIt’s pronounced wuss-tu-shu.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago/wɪs.tə.ʃɚ/
- aidenn0 7y agoLiving in SoCal, as far as I can tell, google maps generates some random numbers and then uses the result to decide whether it should use the Spanish or English pronunciation of roads with Spanish names. In some cases it uses different pronunciations for two words in the same road name (I've heard "Calle Real" pronounced with "Calle" correct but "Real" as the English word "real"; other times it gets calle wrong and other times it gets them both right).
- troebr 7y agoIt does, I moved to New Jersey from France, and my phone was in French. Navigation was kind of funny because it was attempting to pronounce English words as if they were French. For instance, street was pronounced "stré" ("streh", if you are not familiar with é). Google maps was struggling with Roman numerals in France: many streets and avenues are named after kings, say "Louis XVI", "Henry VI" etc. Back in the days it wasn't able to pronounce those, VI would have sounded like "vee". It's probably been fixed since, that was almost 8 years back.
- balls187 7y agoPuyallup is a good one. Tough for many americans to say (who aren't from the region). Pronounced "pew-all-up" for those who are curious.
- Gaelan 7y agoHuh. As someone born and raised in the region, it’s hard to imagine how else it would be pronounced. Poo-y’all-up, maybe?
- balls187 7y ago"Poi-all-up" is what I've typically heard after leaving the area for school. True story, I worked at the South Hill Mall.
- saghm 7y agoI had never heard this name before, and that's the guess I made before reading the rest of the comment.
- wccrawford 7y agoI would have guessed "puh-yall-up".
- B1FF_PSUVM 7y agoIt's doing the right thing - pronouncing local names like a native English speaker just off the boat. Otherwise the poor sod would be totally at sea.
- AmericanChopper 7y agoExactly. If this is going to be localised it should be to the user of the device, not what their current location happens to be.
- jmiserez 7y agoImposing one's wrong pronunciation on purpose is arrogant, lazy and even disrespectful. Furthermore it's not helping anyone long term. The only exceptions I see are anglicized alternative names ("Munich" instead of "München") but even then the local pronunciation should be preferred.
- B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago> wrong pronunciation Ah, sorry, but nowadays no pronunciation is "wrong" - that is unspeakable oppression. We've achieved full Humpty-Dumpty - "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
- stordoff 7y agoThis just enables them to _remain_ lost when someone later mentions the place to them, or they need to ask someone about it.
- tlarkworthy 7y agoIt's even worse in Greece, it can't pronounce the alphabet so spells each letter individually. Turn left at "epsilon alpha delta kappa kappa epsilon x 5"
- StavrosK 7y agoOh God, and that takes for ever as well, since it spells out twenty letters. It's extremely annoying.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoeaðkke? Is that a possible Greek word?
- scrollaway 7y agoIt wouldn't be, because ð is an eth, not a delta (δ). Eth is an old english letter.
- atoav 7y agoOr a current icelandic letter.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoWhat are you going for here? e, a, and k are all English rather than Greek letters. It's just a transcription for the benefit of people who aren't comfortable with Greek letter names.
- devnulloverflow 7y agoEven then, wouldn't a delta just be a "d"? Or do Greeks pronounce the "th" in "the"?
- PopePompus 7y agoYes, and whenever I see Greek street signs, I feel helplessly compelled to group like terms and simplify.
- egypturnash 7y agoHell, you don’t even have to leave the US for this to happen. I live in New Orleans, where the street names are a mish-mash of English and French, with a sprinkling of Greek deities for flavor. While a lot of these names are mispronounced in common usage, Maps’ mispronunciations of these names are, as a rule, different mispronunciations than the ones that would come out of the mouth of a local. It’s both hilarious and saddening, as I suspect a chance that the robo-mispronunciations might end up edging out the local ones over time. This could be fixed by adding a field to every street name for “a series of phonemes that provide a close approximation of local pronunciation” and using that. But I doubt it ever will.
- stordoff 7y ago> This could be fixed by adding a field to every street name for "a series of phonemes that provide a close approximation of local pronunciation" Interestingly, this is essentially how a lot of Japanese forms (at least that I've seen) work. You have a name field, containing, say, 小島秀夫, then a field for the phonetic reading containing こじまひでお. Both are Kojima Hideo (typically Hideo Kojima in English), but the second is the phonetic (kana) form, whereas the first form of some names might be misread or have an unusual reading. You might also see it as furigana, where the phonetic/kana reading is written above the kanji form in small letters.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lurgburg 7y agoAnd in the case of Japanese, the extra field seems to be utterly essential, because the same characters in Kanji might be pronounced in radically different ways. http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2011/02/13/sorting-in-japanese-%E2%80%94-an-unsolved-problem/ http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2011/02/13/sorting-in-ja... There are four Japanese women whose names you have to sort: Junko, Atsuko, Kiyoko, and Akiko. This does not seem difficult, until they each show you how they write their names in kanji: 淳子 (Junko) 淳子 (Atsuko) 淳子 (Kiyoko) 淳子 (Akiko)
- 7y ago
- _bxg1 7y agoEven in central Texas, normal American street names get constantly mispronounced by turn-by-turn
- stordoff 7y agoA few days ago, I encountered Siri pronouncing A1 (/ei/ one[1]), a major road in the UK, as "ah one" (how you might pronounce a lowercase a). Threw me for a second as I've not heard it make that mistake before. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJvept23aHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJvept23aHc
- cjrp 7y agoIf I use a postcode as a destination, Waze sometimes decides to pronounce the letters as if they're units. "You've arrived at "AA1 5Terajoules"
- SAI_Peregrinus 7y agoWith a destination from the contacts list I get You've arrived at "Drive <doctor's name>'s office".
- lhorie 7y agoHeck, mine can't even handle "Legoland". It pronounces it as "LeGOland"
- crazygringo 7y agoThat's a tough one, because you really need both options available. "Mispronouncing" to your phone's language is actually helpful if you don't speak the language, because you'll legitimately understand it better. Local pronunciation can often be completely and maddeningly unrecognizable to a foreigner. While if you speak the language, it's obviously nonsensical to have it mispronounced and you want the real thing of course. Example: "Rio Tinto" in Portuguese is pronounced "HEE-oo CHEEN-too". If you don't speak the language, you're NEVER gonna map those sounds to a street sign because the "r" and "t" sounds you're expecting aren't there at all! While hearing a completely incorrect "REE-oh TIN-toh", you can probably recognize.
- freddie_mercury 7y agoThis is definitely true. I live in Vietnam and the same problem exists here. If you used true "local pronunciation", most foreigners wouldn't be able to understand many of the street names. The disconnect between the two pronunciations is so stark that many times taxi drivers have literally no idea what street a foreigner is telling them to go to.
- tseabra 7y agoNote: that would be in Brazilian Portuguese. "REE-oh TIN-toh" is not that far off from Portuguese from Portugal.
- devnulloverflow 7y agoI was going to say that, since Rio Tinto is a mining company, that it probably originates in Brazil. But actually it is an Anglo-Australian company named after a mine in Spain. (Which, according to Wikipedia, started operations 5000 years ago).
- scrollaway 7y agoHere's a few fun facts about Belgium: - Belgium has three official languages (French: fr-be, Flemish: nl-be and German: de-be). - Belgium is divided in provinces. - Provinces in Belgium are either French (thus mainly speak french) or Flemish (thus mainly speak flemish). - … with the exception of some areas near the german border which mainly speak german. But not the whole province. - Brussels is not part of a province. It's part of a region called "Brussels Capital". It is French speaking, although it's in the middle of a Flemish province. This is what that looks like: https://twitter.com/Adys/status/1175063489653727233 https://twitter.com/Adys/status/1175063489653727233 As you can imagine, most software doesn't account for any of that shit, yet tries to be clever and eg. have websites ignore accept-language. I recently updated my Nintendo account to be in Belgium. My nintendo account is now half-translated in dutch (NOT flemish). Half because their dutch translation is vastly incomplete. I have no apparent way to change this back without lying about where I live.
- comboy 7y agoGoogle can probably provide this kind of map with much higher resolution thanks to android. I'd love to see a zoomable world map with stats of what language people set on their devices. Even info about how many percent is set to English would be interesting.
- asveikau 7y ago> Half because their dutch translation is vastly incomplete. By this you mean it shows a mixture of en and nl strings? I have often found it super jarring that people are willing to ship such a thing. Is it better or worse to not attempt nl at all for such a circumstance? And then, OK, maybe Europeans are comfortable with English, but what about when this situation arises for markets where nobody understands English? You can go down a rabbit hole of having different fallbacks for different markets, and sometimes maybe that will work, but it's likely to be just as jarring. Your Belgium case even suggests maybe the fallbacks should be a per-user setting. User comes in with a list of what they are OK being presented with...
- scrollaway 7y ago
- bsimpson 7y agoIt drives me nuts when Google Maps presumes I can think in different units whenever I travel. Yes, I'm in Italy now. No, that doesn't mean I forgot how long a mile is, or have instantly learned to judge the world in meters.
- seventhtiger 7y agoIn some Muslim country Google forces you to use the Hijri lunar calendar. There is no option to switch to Gregorian. Google knows best and everyone in that country wants Hijri.
- noneeeed 7y agoI could understand making that an option though, as presumably the distances on signs will be in km. But as usual with this sort of thing, it's developers assuming they know best rather than suggesting and asking.
- marmaduke 7y agoI have a Renault in France with navigation, but set it to use the English (British only unfortunately but I'm getting used to it) voice. It can still pronounce the streets correctly, which after living here a while is exactly what I want. So it doesn't seem too hard but lack of prioritization.
- bboygravity 7y agoBlackberry Maps (Blackberry OS 10's navigation / maps app) did exactly this. It pronounced street names and points of interest in the local language of wherever you where navigating. Perfectly. It was released in 2013, but I used the 2015ish version. It was absolutely mind blowing to me that Google Maps and others don't do this when I switched to Android. Even more mind blowing that they still chose to not implement this to this day. In non-English speaking countries like Europe, this means you have to literally change the language settings every time you cross a border. Borders are all over the place in Europe. It feels like 1998 tech to have to do this. And for those claiming that the "Englishified version" of a street name in a foreign language is easier to understand: no. It isn't for anybody who speaks more than 1 language (AKA: most people outside of English speaking and large and/or totalitarian countries).
- cmarschner 7y agoWaze (by default) is even worse - as you cross the borders it switches to the local language, _including the directions_... so as you enter Italy it expects you to suddenly switch your brain to understand the directions in Italian. I come to think nobody at Waze ever thought about this use case...
- noneeeed 7y agoGoogle maps butchers a lot of place names in the UK even when it's set to British English. In fareness, that's because many are simply not spelt phonetically. Driving around Wales or Cornwall are particularly fun, it really can't deal with the names. Not sure if it manages better when it's in Welsh language mode (if that's available).
- cbm-vic-20 7y agoLikewise, places in the US that take their names from English get butchered (Gloucester and Worcester in Massachusetts are examples). "Concord" and "Berlin" are fun because they are pronounced differently depending on which one you're talking about. Native American names like Scituate are also tough for most GPS speech synthesizers.
- ollie87 7y agoYou think Italian is bad? I was once in Cyprus using Google Maps and it decided it couldn't cope with the alphabet, so it pronounced each individual letter on each road and placename. It would still be reading the road name and you'd be on the next one.
- fifnir 7y ago> More than half of the world's population speaks more than one language - we need to get better at building software that accounts for that. Yes please, can't I just setup a cookie or something that lets sites know which languages I speak? I'm so sick and tired of american sites forcing spanish on me because I log from a spanish IP...
- Piskvorrr 7y ago`Accept-Language` seems to be the standardized version of this that nobody uses :(
- rograndom 7y agoWe live in the US and our Toyota Highlander's navigation basically loses it's mind when we travel into Quebec. When we're in a city, we like to have voice navigation on so we're not looking at the screen the whole time, but it will just go "In 300 feet... turn on... (large volume increase) GAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGA". It was disturbing the first time, but hilarious the next few until we just turned it off.
- signal11 7y agoAndroid and iOS autocomplete both need to get smarter about this as well. I don't always want to switch keyboards to use a different language/script!
- Doxin 7y agoOn my android phone I've got two languages set up and it seems to be pretty good about autocorrect in the right language. I'm rather curious what the difference is between us that it doesn't work automatically for you. Even google assistant understands me when I speak either language.
- signal11 7y agoIt's quite a common scenario for Indic-language users. I'm mainly typing in English and, depending on context and the audience, sometimes in two other Indic languages using the Latin alphabet. There are a lot of reasons for this, and I don't think I'm alone here: * Like many Indic language users I speak and understand multiple languages and I'd like to contextually reflect this in my IMs * Relative lack of fluency/comfort reading Indic script (almost each Indic language has a different abiguda) * A pronounced lack of experience typing using the multiple abigudas, all of which are more complex to type than the Latin alphabet I'd really like to be able to type Indic words using Latin script without fighting with autocorrect -- or turning it off altogether.