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Why I use non-American English voices in my text to speech
- mdip 13y agoI am glad to see I'm not the only one who has done this! Ever since my first Garmin GPS, I have always switched to the Australian accented English because it 'felt the most accurate'. But thinking about it now, it's clear the reason was that US and British English is so common to my ears that I noticed every flaw. Australian was just unfamiliar enough to have me focusing on decoding the street names rather than noticing the unnatural gap between two phenomes.
- coenhyde 13y agoAffirmative. I'm an Australian living in the US and the Australian accent on the iPhone is horrible. I prefer the US accent, which is much more soothing on my ears.
- FigBug 13y agoI switched my Garmin to Australian as well. Now it calls onramps 'sliproads'. Does know what the abbreviation HWY means. A few others as well. Not sure why that's encoded in the accent and not the location.
- jfoster 13y agoI am an Australian. Seems they got it wrong. I am familiar with onramps, but haven't heard of sliproads until now. We use the Hwy abbreviation in Australia, too.
- NamTaf 13y agoAs per the parent, we refer to them as onramps in Australia, though that may be an Americanisation of our language with exposure to US-centric TV. I am also familiar with the term 'sliproads' and although I don't use it naturally, something in the back of my mind says it is in fact the 'traditional' name for them. it might in fact be the British version.
- m3mnoch 13y agothis is the same exact reason i use "amy" from ivona for my morning commute. as a non-brit, rather than frustratingly hard to understand, listening to her instead is totally dreamy... that, and she doesn't stumble over names like "Abalamahalamatandra".
- billforsternz 13y agoYou use sat nav for your morning commute ?
- mikeash 13y agoI have in the past, for realtime traffic info and rerouting.
- billforsternz 13y agoCool, I didn't even know that was a thing yet (other than via old school radio broadcasting).
- mikeash 13y agoIt's common on smartphones. There are lots of apps out there (Google Maps and Waze being two that come to mind) that collect real-time traffic data from their own users and public sources, and use that to find the most efficient route for you at the current time. Standalone GPSs can often do the same thing by linking to your smartphone and using its data plan to download the realtime traffic data. It can be really handy in a city with dense and variable rush-hour traffic.
- m3mnoch 13y agooh. sorry. just saw this comment. and, no. i don't use sat nav for my morning commute. i've written a few applications enabling my phone to read books, news and other bits of information to me as i drive into the office.
- dunsany 13y agoYeah, the problem we found is that when we switched to non-American English, Siri expects us to be speaking it as well... and messes up what she understands.
- kibibu 13y agoThis is the second time I've seen "chock it up" instead of "chalk it up" in the last 2 days. Is this a regional thing?
- NAFV_P 13y agoI was wondering if received pronunciation was an available option.
- jedmeyers 13y ago"Turn right on El Camino rEal", said Siri's sister from UK.
- objclxt 13y agoYeah, this all falls apart when you're driving in a city like San Francisco or Los Angeles, where many of the street names are in spanish. British Siri just mangles them! That said, I'm a Brit myself so I can just stick with the US voice and get the benefit of both worlds.
- ilyanep 13y agoIn my experience, US-English text-to-speech mangles those street names too (my favorite is "El Monte" as "Ell Monty"), though I haven't used Siri in particular.
- georgemcbay 13y agoAs a San Diegan, I can confirm this happens all the time with US-English on various TTS engines. La Jolla pronounced exactly the way you'd expect someone with no exposure to Spanish to pronounce it (rather than 'La Hoya'). El Cajon ('El Cahone') becomes El Kage-on. etc.
- gweinberg 13y agoI can't fault the machine too much. I mispronounce local names all the time, and I live here.
- cstrat 13y agoDoes anyone else have issues when dictating phone numbers to be dialled?? If I tell Siri to call "1800528555" it will interpret this as "Call 18005 to 8555" Fail... What am I doing wrong?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hanley 13y agoMaybe it's because you're forgetting the last digit?
- bitwize 13y agoNot if he's Aussie. Australian phone numbers are a four-digit area code plus a six-digit number -- and Australia has reserved "1800" as a toll-free area code for congruence with American numbers.
- melloclello 13y agoAlternatively - use the OS X 'Fred' voice (or even 'Zarvox'). It's been around since 1990, and it sounds like a robot should, not like a robot trying to sound like a human. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlainTalk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlainTalk
- jodrellblank 13y agoI've wondered if foreign humans sometimes fall into uncanny valley in their vocalising and behaviours, and then seem extra alien and 'wrong'.
- jamesrom 13y agoI'm Australian and the Australian voice sounds so bad to me. I have to use American English.
- shirro 13y agoI am Australian and use the British. The Australian doesn't sound right. How lucky we are to have so many mutually understandable yet varied accents. I wish they had more UK and US regional accents for a bit of variation.
- gerbal 13y agoAs an American a strongly regional American Midwestern or Rural Canadian would probably be pretty nice. weird enough that it just sounds odd rather than machine-ey.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- auctiontheory 13y agoI use South African "Tessa" on my Mac. Until now, I'd never understood why I preferred her - this explanation makes so much sense!
- NextUserName 13y ago>Anyone who works regularly with people from other countries will recognize this right away. Your brain goes into a sort of fuzzy recognition mode searching for meaning rather than critiquing flaws. This is an interesting reason. I have always noticed that the British and Australian accented voices sounded better. I though that perhaps it was easier to emulate their pronunciations. Would the inverse hold true for British/Australian people as well? Does US English sound the best to them in TTS applications?
- gradstudent 13y ago> Would the inverse hold true for British/Australian people as well? Does US English sound the best to them in TTS applications? US English always sounds wrong. No matter who is speaking. UK English or non-cockney Australian is the way to go.
- gohrt 13y agoSo the idea is to add more errors, so the other errors don't seem so lonely? That makes the system more usable?
- adam-a 13y agoThis reminds me of dithering in computer graphics. Take an imperfect system and add noise to mask the imperfections.
- unwind 13y agoExcept, perhaps a little, that dithering is not "noise", i.e. it's not random but instead carefully chosen to appear (to the eye of the beholder) as data that isn't really there.
- lookACamel 13y agoWell the "noise" from the non-US accent isn't random either.
- TheCoelacanth 13y agoIt's not adding more errors; it's just choosing a less familiar accent to imitate so that you are less capable of noticing how the imitation deviates from the correct way of speaking in that accent.
- jasonkester 13y agoI've noticed while traveling that American English is actually rather difficult to understand. My slurmumbling west coast accent with no consonants or spaces between words is basically undecipherable in a lot of places. So I pull out my Cheesy Irish Accent. That thing works wonders. Words all start with a capital letter, and have gaps between them. You speak louder and more decisively. It's really the perfect form of speech, apart from the embarrassment of having other native English speakers (or god forbid Irishmen) hear you do it. And you get to talk like a Pirate. What's not to love? Give it a try next time you're abroad!
- tehwalrus 13y ago...pirates talk with[1] a west country accent, not an Irish one. Not that this detracts from the story, it's a good hack (and I'd love to hear you do it so I can try and work out where I think you're speaking from!) Certainly when speaking foreign languages, I always do my most over the top accent, which seems to go down very well. [1] EDIT: stereotypically...
- jasonkester 13y agoCertainly when speaking foreign languages, I always do my most over the top accent, which seems to go down very well. Indeed. My Spanish goes down best when I'm channeling Antonio Banderas.
- carlob 13y agoThis is interesting. I'm an Italian native speaker. Sometimes GPS voices have a very marked accent (usually from Milan). To me it ends up sounding parodic rather than soothing (I'm from Rome).