Why I use non-American English voices in my text to speech | Hacker News Reader

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

johnmarshall4.tumblr.com

93 pointsphenylene61 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

As 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.

> it might in fact be the British version.

Correct, we call them sliproads in Britain, and I believe in Ireland too.

Except that a sliproad can be either an on-ramp or an off-ramp.

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?

Should be "chalk" for all intensive purposes.

for slack purposes too, methinks.

I see it as a mute point though.

This thread is getting complicating to follow.

It is literally impossible.

That's the way it is in a doggy-dog world!

This whole thread is a damp squid. I'm going out to get an expresso.

Case and point, I should of not used the author as an escape goat, irregardless.

Your mistake was putting the thread on a pedal stool.

Run to the coffee shop at full tit.

This hole thread's beyond my apprehension.

Pff. I could care less.

I see what you did there!

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

That link peaked my interest.

Piqued.

FTFY

That's just ad homonym.

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

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

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!

...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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Well the "noise" from the non-US accent isn't random either.

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.

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

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).

I was wondering if received pronunciation was an available option.

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

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?

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

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.

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".

You use sat nav for your morning commute ?

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

Cool, I didn't even know that was a thing yet (other than via old school radio broadcasting).

It'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

As 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.

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

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

>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?

> 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.

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