Test of Text-to-Speech (TTS) Abbreviations in Waze Clients

[GizmoGuy411]

Single letters to be pronounced as letters when a capitalized letter is surrounded by double quotes was the suggestion made to Waze back in October 2012.

When I have not retested all the permutations, it looks like from those who have tested the letters, N, E, S, and W, that Waze has changed functionality so that upper or lower case letters surrounded by single or double quotes will now say the letter and not the cardinal direction.

I'll amend the list once I can test more permutations.

[Wajo357]

Single letters to be pronounced as letters when a capitalized letter is surrounded by double quotes was the suggestion made to Waze back in October 2012.

When I have not retested all the permutations, it looks like from those who have tested the letters, N, E, S, and W, that Waze has changed functionality so that upper or lower case letters surrounded by single or double quotes will now say the letter and not the cardinal direction.

I'll amend the list once I can test more permutations.

Sounds good. So now that your tests are done, here come the questions concerning Brooklyn, NY:

1) Should we change Ave N, E, W, S?
2) If yes, would you prefer single or double quotes?
3) Would that screw up navigation search if someone just enters in 1304 Ave S, Brooklyn NY, since it is now only Ave "S"? Would adding an alternate name of Ave S help?
4) Should we just blanket all of the letters in Brooklyn with the quotes specified in 2?
5) I assume we should lock the roads with the changes, correct?

Thanks!

Sincerely,
Joey

[orbitc]

Single letters to be pronounced as letters when a capitalized letter is surrounded by double quotes was the suggestion made to Waze back in October 2012.

When I have not retested all the permutations, it looks like from those who have tested the letters, N, E, S, and W, that Waze has changed functionality so that upper or lower case letters surrounded by single or double quotes will now say the letter and not the cardinal direction.

I'll amend the list once I can test more permutations.

Sounds good. So now that your tests are done, here come the questions concerning Brooklyn, NY:

1) Should we change Ave N, E, W, S?
2) If yes, would you prefer single or double quotes?
3) Would that screw up navigation search if someone just enters in 1304 Ave S, Brooklyn NY, since it is now only Ave "S"? Would adding an alternate name of Ave S help?
4) Should we just blanket all of the letters in Brooklyn with the quotes specified in 2?
5) I assume we should lock the roads with the changes, correct?

Thanks!

Sincerely,
Joey

If I may persuade GizmoGuy411, I would tink, it would be nice if all change to single quote and keep Avenue as is. For example: Avenue 'N'

[jasonh300]

3) Would that screw up navigation search if someone just enters in 1304 Ave S, Brooklyn NY, since it is now only Ave "S"? Would adding an alternate name of Ave S help?

What you name a street currently has no bearing on address searches. The street names we assign in WME are only for TTS and display purposes.

[Wajo357]

3) Would that screw up navigation search if someone just enters in 1304 Ave S, Brooklyn NY, since it is now only Ave "S"? Would adding an alternate name of Ave S help?

What you name a street currently has no bearing on address searches. The street names we assign in WME are only for TTS and display purposes.

Perfect. I'm just trying to make sure all basis are covered before we screw anything up

[txemt]

So, when you have 125 S Ave W E, it should read out how?

[davidg666]

Single letters to be pronounced as letters when a capitalized letter is surrounded by double quotes was the suggestion made to Waze back in October 2012.

When I have not retested all the permutations, it looks like from those who have tested the letters, N, E, S, and W, that Waze has changed functionality so that upper or lower case letters surrounded by single or double quotes will now say the letter and not the cardinal direction.

I'll amend the list once I can test more permutations.

Do we have any word from Waze - or do we have any way of communicating with them - about getting TTS behaviour tweaked in general?

I ask because there's an issue that affects TTS here in Ireland - and presumably also in South Africa, where they use similarly-named roads - that could easily be resolved by making the TTS behave slightly differently.

Most major highways here are referred to with the letter 'N' and a number - for example "N4", "N81" and so on. So split divided highways might be named "N4 N" and "N4 S" on the map. However, Waze TTS always pronounces the letter 'N' as "north", so directions to turn onto one of these roads get spoken as (for example) "turn left onto north four north" instead of "turn left onto enn four north", as they should be.

Naming roads like this with quotes of any kind would look ugly and certainly wouldn't match what's seen on the road signs. I know most countries seem to use a combination of letters and digits for road designations, so it's just unfortunate that some countries happen to use letters that are also the same letters used for cardinal directions. However, if Waze TTS could pronounce letters that flow together with digits as the letters that they are, that would make a lot more sense than the current practice.

++David \ davidg666

[Kuhlkatz]

I ask because there's an issue that affects TTS here in Ireland - and presumably also in South Africa, where they use similarly-named roads - that could easily be resolved by making the TTS behave slightly differently.

David, I have been following this thread with some new interest, as we indeed have the same problem. I drive on the 'North One South' and 'North One North' daily, so it is a bit of a thorn in my side, especially since I have seen quite a few URs on this and know I can do nothing to fix it.

We can likely live with the 'N'1 N / 'N'1 (N) or 'N'1 S naming convention if Waze 'tweaked' TTS slightly, but I was not happy with resorting to the 'n'1 N or 'n'1 S convention to work around this.

I'm just curious as to how the name actually looks and displays in the client, and how visible the single quotes are.

Instead of just 'tweaking' this every time, Waze devs should possibly just look at using or defining some opening character and closing character that will likely NEVER appear in any actual names, and use that as a 'literal' indicator, where anything that apears inside the literal is not subjected to testing for abbreviations.

Something simple like the square brackets or even the curly braces. Naming it [N]1 N, or even [N1] N, and they simply drop the brackets in the displayed name, and do not pronounce [N] as 'north'. Even something like ~N~1 N, where the single 'tilde' characters are ignored. I presume fixed 'opening and closing' delimiters would be simpler to search. They could even be used as an indicator that this character sequence should be pronounced individually instead of treating it as a word, like [QE]2 or even [NY] being explicitly overridden as 'Queue Eee Two' or 'Enn Why'.

Something like this would be far simpler to implement in code, instead of having to populate an additional DB field to use as a TTS override using phonetics, where 99% of all existing named segments would likely never make use of the phonetic override.
It just requires some simple string manipulation during Back-End parsing which they likely do already.

[orbitc]

Both David and Carel's points valid. It would definitely be better if Waze Dev. would tweak this on their end.
I know that Waze Champs are also aware and they actually working with us to find a solution and doing testing etc. GizmoGuy411 and jasonh300 are being very helpful as well.

Having said that, IMO, the immediate solution for both of you for now to decide to use either 'N' or "N"
For example: N4 N would be 'N'4 N or "N"4 N.

I know they don't look pretty but, I think, until Waze Dev update anything internally, this would the way to go.

In addition, we are still iron it out Avenue N issue.

Thanks

[jasonh300]

So, when you have 125 S Ave W E, it should read out how?

Geez...you petition the city council to rename it "Elm Street" and be done with it.