Is “Dr” being pronounced as “Doctor” wide spread or isolated?
Can you send me some examples?
I want to know if there is any correlation to the occurrence of “Sulgrave Dr” being pronounced as “Sulgrave Doctor” that we have found before in multiple locations.
I’ve seen both happen, but only intermittently and only in some places. It seems like sometimes in some places, it would say Garden State Parkway North and other times in other places Garden State Parkway En.
Also, any updates on Br being read as branch despite many places using Br to mean Bridge? Or should we be using Brg for bridge, even though it conflicts with local signage?
Just to be clear, issues with “N” not returning “North” have been reported a few times recently. I haven’t heard any issues with “Pkwy” not returning “Parkway” (the one reported issue was actually just a typo, “Pwky”).
Yeah, love those. Been bitten by them a few times. And why I say bite, I mean by a fit of laughter.
I also saw a UR flaming Waze for 9W. I’m not sure exactly what Waze spoke, but the complaint was that there are two separate NY highways, 9 and 9W, and blah blah blah east and west of Hudson River. UR was on 9W, maybe Waze said “to route 9 west,” which he took to mean “state route 9, direction west.”
There ought to be a way to flag a piece of text as being “non-abbreviated,” so that Waze pronounces it exactly as-is. Or, alternatively, a way to type in the pronounced version of a segment name, so that Waze speech in fine tuned for a problematic reading.
I’ve actually seen exactly what you were talking about when I was up in Newburgh last week. My guess would be that someone (I didn’t look at the segments in WME) made the road US-9 instead of US-9W (what it probably should be) in order to get the shield to render correctly. Currently shields do not draw correctly for any highway that has a letter as part of its number (this occurs a lot in New York). In any case, this is a bad reason, because the shield rendering engine is being fixed to accommodate highway markers with letters on them.
Also, I believe at one time the TTS would read US-9W as You Ess Nine West, so the W may have been removed to prevent confusion on the road that actually runs north/south. I think that’s supposed to be fixed now - so as if the W is in the same word (not separated by a space) as a highway number (in this case, US-9), it will be read as W and not West. So I would imagine the road should be changed back to US-9W.
Remember you can put E, S, W or N inside single quote marks and then the Waze app says the letter and not the expansion. That is ‘E’ for example. It is not the perfect solution, but it does work.
To further the 9W phenomenon, I’ve seen the portion of this road in New Jersey named US-9w, with a lowercase w. I’m not sure, however, if this is a workaround for the west problem or whether it even causes the w to be read as a w instead of west.
I figured out what was going on. Here are my findings.
In the West Point area, the highway is labelled as US-9w, with a lowercase W, no space.
On the livemap, that shows as labelled.
In the Waze app map it shows a shielded 9, no W
In the Waze app route highlighter, it shows as 9 in a box, no W
In direction lists, both browser and app, it shows as US-9w
I don’t see anywhere that it is milabelled as US-9 withoyt the W, sorry PhantomSould
Speech? Dunno, I wish there was a way to force Waze to speak out a series of directions without traveling, so we could test this sort of thing. Ditto getting a route in the editor using the unposted changes, so we can verify that we produce good results without having to wait for an update (especially since if we found out its wrong, that means another day’s cycle to fix, frustrating for other motorists, frustrating for the editor). But 'm off topic now.
So basically, the user’s problem was a bug in way that I was not aware of for lettered shields.
Update on 9W. Text to speech says West. Ouch. I can’t see manually updating every segment to use 9’w’ instead of 9w. Also, I believe the quotes do show up, so 9’w’ would be a problem. Maybe ‘US-9w’?
If it is capitalized, it shouldn’t do this. I know that I have “99W” and “99E” here in Oregon and they are always pronounced as double-you and eee respectively. However, these are state routes, so perhaps Waze doesn’t have the same rule for the US routes.
I have observed that this could be happening when my phone is bogged down with other tasks. Perhaps the thread that expands abbreviations has a low priority, and if it doesn’t run in time, Waze just reads it as-is.
Found another fun one: User report that “wrong street name. penn st is not Pennsylvania” and indeed it isn’t. I’ve single-quoted it where I could (part of it is beyond my editable area).
I know you’re a champ and all, but you might want to double-check that with the developers. There is a bunch of abbreviation data on the client that seem to be there at all times, and TTS engines run client side on most platforms.