Why I use non-American English voices in my text to speech

http://johnmarshall4.tumblr.com/post/79184171773/why-i-use-non-american-english-voices-in-my-text-to

by phenylene • 12 years ago

93 61 12 years ago

johnmarshall4.tumblr.com

mdip• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

Affirmative. 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• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

I 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.

m3mnoch2• 12 years ago

this 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".

billforsternz3• 12 years ago

You use sat nav for your morning commute ?

mikeash2• 12 years ago

I have in the past, for realtime traffic info and rerouting.

m3mnoch2• 12 years ago

oh. 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• 12 years ago

Yeah, 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.

yeukhon• 12 years ago

That reminds me of this parody: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU

ilyanep2• 12 years ago

I'm really pleased that I knew exactly what this was before clicking. I send this to people anytime I see them fighting a speech-to-text engine.

kibibu• 12 years ago

This 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?

ngokevin• 12 years ago

Should be "chalk" for all intensive purposes.

Mz• 12 years ago

for slack purposes too, methinks.

elwell3• 12 years ago

I see it as a mute point though.

codr• 12 years ago

I see what you did there!

decode• 12 years ago

It seems to be an eggcorn: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/1112/chock/

richdougherty• 12 years ago

That link peaked my interest.

gohrt2• 12 years ago

It's just his quirky accent. Don't think he's a creepy non-human.

NAFV_P• 12 years ago

I was wondering if received pronunciation was an available option.

jedmeyers• 12 years ago

"Turn right on El Camino rEal", said Siri's sister from UK.

objclxt• 12 years ago

Yeah, 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.

ilyanep2• 12 years ago

In 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.

gweinberg• 12 years ago

I can't fault the machine too much. I mispronounce local names all the time, and I live here.

cstrat• 12 years ago

Does 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?

hanley• 12 years ago

Maybe it's because you're forgetting the last digit?

bitwize• 12 years ago

Not 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• 12 years ago

Alternatively - 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

jodrellblank• 12 years ago

I've wondered if foreign humans sometimes fall into uncanny valley in their vocalising and behaviours, and then seem extra alien and 'wrong'.

jamesrom• 12 years ago

I'm Australian and the Australian voice sounds so bad to me. I have to use American English.

shirro• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

As 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.

auctiontheory• 12 years ago

I use South African "Tessa" on my Mac. Until now, I'd never understood why I preferred her - this explanation makes so much sense!

NextUserName• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

gohrt2• 12 years ago

So the idea is to add more errors, so the other errors don't seem so lonely? That makes the system more usable?

adam-a• 12 years ago

This reminds me of dithering in computer graphics. Take an imperfect system and add noise to mask the imperfections.

unwind• 12 years ago

Except, 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.

TheCoelacanth• 12 years ago

It'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.

jasonkester2• 12 years ago

I'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• 12 years 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...

jasonkester2• 12 years ago

Certainly 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• 12 years ago

This 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).

Why I use non-American English voices in my text to speech

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