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Abbreviations and TTS navigation voices

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Hi All,

As you may know, the UK English TTS (Text-To-Speech) Navigation voice Serena (Nuance) has been replaced by the UK English TTS voice Kate (Google).
Those voices read street names aloud but there are some issues (abbreviations not read correctly, incorrect pronunciation...)
We need your help to test and report such issues so that the Waze Team can correct them.
The list of abbreviations (set by country now) is from Wazeopedia Ireland: list of abbreviations.
If your have any suggestions, please do not hesitate to post in this thread.

All tests are with the Google female "Kate" voice only as used in UK/Ireland. Another English voice choice for UK/Ireland, "Tomas", is likely to use the same TTS databases.

To hear the most current TTS results from your Waze client device, it is necessary to clear your current TTS cache. Enter "cc@tts" (case sensitive) without quotes in the Navigation search to clear the cache. Waze should reply with a "TTS cache has been cleared!" popup box.

If you already know or learn any TTS results, fill up the Google Spreadsheet below:
Waze Abbreviations and TTS (Ireland).
Please submit only results that you are absolutely sure of, with the Permalink for all issues, and the confirmed TTS output result.

For abbreviations used in other countries, please refer to How to label and name roads (by country).
Thanks to Gizmo for his initial post.

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Last edited by lsin023 on Mon Jun 15, 2020 3:11 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Post by davidg666
Timbones wrote:I'm not sure about exact details here, as we get confusing and conflicting answers from staff. We can certainly ask to have Tce added as an abbreviation, and it won't be a problem for UK users.
If that could be done (as well as having the 'N' in (for example) "M11 N" pronounced as "north") then it would be very handy, and would probably the only difference we'd need from UK TTS - and would also mean that we wouldn't need a separate set of TTS rules to the UK (with all the maintenance that that would entail).

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Post by davidg666
Hi Stan,
lsin023 wrote:You have published the list of abbreviations Waze Wiki: How_to_label_and_name_roads_(Ireland) some time ago and it differs from United_Kingdom/Roads#Abbreviations and not 'only' 'N' and 'Tce'. I'm still trying to make a list of those issues here and it takes times as I don't get much help.
Although I wrote that page, I didn't create the table of abbreviations - the page sucks it in automatically from elsewhere, although I'm now starting to wonder if that was a bad idea. I think we could probably make our own table of about ten abbreviations (just the most common ones, like Rd, St, Ave, Dr, etc)

I commend your work in making a list of issues with TTS and abbreviations, although it's a shame there hasn't been much feedback. I'd really like to see more engagement with the forum from our editors, but I have a bad feeling that many of them may not even be aware of the forum. If anybody has any ideas for increasing the participation in the forum by editors, that would be very welcome.

Naturally editing (or any Waze work) is voluntary, and unfortunately some people have very little time; I just sneak in a few minutes here and there - a couple of years ago I had hours a day to do this, but now, much less so.
lsin023 wrote:Unfortunately, some editors keep chasing points and updating road geometry which don't require as we don't have locking policy...
I think anybody who edits to chase points (and without making the map better) is doing us all a disservice. We do have the facility to block dishonest editors if necessary.

Speaking of a locking policy: do you think we should have one? Obviously it's possible for one L1 editor to cause a lot of damage right now, so maybe we should be looking at routinely locking high-value roads such as motorways.
lsin023 wrote:
davidg666 wrote:It would probably be better if we included a link to the standard Abbreviations & Acronyms page instead of having our own table.
The entries have only been tested for the US English "Samantha" voice and some are no longer valid.
Don't you think that we should test the entries first?
I think a much-reduced list of our own abbreviations (maybe ten, as mentioned above) would be worth creating - and much quicker and easier to test than a very long list.
lsin023 wrote:There are many street names in Waze map in Ireland with, 'Grn', 'Pde', 'Lwr', 'Upr', 'Est', etc as suggested in Waze Wiki Ireland and I believe that many editors still use it as 'THE' reference.
Maybe adding a note inviting readers to visit the Wiki page regularly due to 'coming changes' would be useful, at least until the final decision regarding the naming convention.
I have a feeling (untested) that very few editors come to the forum and even fewer editors look at that wiki page. That said, we should certainly make sure that it's accurate. What do you think of a very short list of preferred abbreviations and a link to the standard abbreviations and acronyms page?
lsin023 wrote:If we use the UK list, what do we do with all those street names with 'Lwr', 'Est', 'Grn'..? MapRaids?
To request Waze Team to load a script which renames all street names with issues in Ireland and popup a message in WME to inform editors of the new naming convention in Ireland? (not so many read messages here) Really possible?
I don't know if a MapRaid is necessary (if we were to have a MapRaid, maybe it would be best used to make those parts of the country that have almost no roads at all), but if there are some abbreviations that the TTS can't handle then we should certainly make it a habit to rename bad abbreviations as we come across them.

As for automated renaming: we now have a means of getting city/town names renamed and/or merged, so it's no longer necessary to do this by hand, but I'm not aware of an automated means of renaming parts of street names. We can certainly ask Waze HQ about this, but I wouldn't have high hopes of getting an automated script run to transform all unsupported abbreviations to their longer form.

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Post by davidg666
Timbones wrote:PS: here's a page I threw together quickly that shows incorrectly named roads by city in Ireland. This would make a good foundation for a Map Raid, and editors will probably find and fix other problems at the same time.

Let me know if there are any abbreviations that needs to be added or removed from this list.
Thanks Tim!

I'm happy to report that some of them look more incorrect than others; for example, there's some that have "Road" instead of "Rd", which is a fairly minor incorrectness. There's a few Irish-language ones too that are flagged, don't need to be changed.

What's wrong with the abbreviation "Cres" for "Crescent", like this one?

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Post by davidg666
Hi Stan,
lsin023 wrote:
davidg666 wrote:What's wrong with the abbreviation "Cres" for "Crescent", like this one?
The page is generated based on the list of UK abbreviations
Oops; I should read more carefully and reply less quickly :)
lsin023 wrote:The UK list seems a good starting point, not the US one (the present Irish list).
This limited list of common abbreviations should match the ones drivers can see on street signs.
==>David, do you think the UK list matches? Except "Ter". How about "Gn", "Gr","Cr"..?
Except for "Ter", I think we should go with a subset of the UK list, mainly because some of the items on the list (like "Boulevard") we rarely have and partly because some of them (like "Green" and "Grove") are relatively rare and aren't obvious to users when they see them (not everybody has TTS turned on). I'd suggest this as a starting point:

Avenue -> Ave
Close -> Cl
Court -> Ct
Crescent -> Cr
Drive -> Dr
Junction -> J
Lane -> Ln
Place -> Pl
Park -> Pk
Road -> Rd
Saint -> St.
Square -> Sq
Street -> St
Terrace -> Ter

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Post by davidg666
Stan: thank you! This looks great.
lsin023 wrote:The final Irish list would be the UK list with the exception of: [...]

=>Do you all agree with that final list? David?
I agree with most of it - I'd just suggest dropping Boulevard, Broadway, Garden and Gardens. This is because I don't think we have any Broadways, almost no Boulevards, and only a few Garden/Gardens.

The main reason for abbreviations is to save screen space; I think very rare abbreviations may confuse some people, and we only save three characters for the relatively rare Garden/Gardens.

We seem to need a few TTS changes. I think by far the most important is getting 'N' to be pronounced as "north", mainly because this is appears on very many motorways, so is likely to be noticed a lot.

It looks like we're getting pretty close to a consensus too - I'd suggest sending a PM to as many active editors as we can think of (certainly all AMs, and any other editors that come to mind) pointing them at this thread and asking for their agreement (or otherwise :) )

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Post by davidg666
lsin023 wrote:
davidg666 wrote:I'd suggest sending a PM to as many active editors as we can think of (certainly all AMs, and any other editors that come to mind) pointing them at this thread and asking for their agreement (or otherwise :) )
I would also suggest that giving a 2-week-timeframe for this would be fair so that it can be implemented soon. Agreed?
Do you mean that we should give the editors we contact two weeks to respond (in case anybody wants to dissent or propose any changes) before we proclaim the new list of abbreviations as the way forward? I definitely agree with this.
lsin023 wrote:The scoreboard in Waze client might be a good list of (active) Wazers added to your list of editors.
Every time I look at the scoreboard in the client, I see lots of names that I've almost never seen as editors, so I have a feeling that lots of users on the scoreboard are just normal users, not map editors.

In any case, we have a means of getting a list of all editors, the last date they edited and how many segments they've edited in their editing lifetime. I reckon everybody who's edited at least once since the start of this year and has edited 100 or more segments in their lifetime would be a good starting point. I'll start getting that list together.

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Post by davidg666
lsin023 wrote:
davidg666 wrote:we have a means of getting a list of all editors. I reckon everybody who's edited at least once since the start of this year and has edited 100 or more segments in their lifetime would be a good starting point. I'll start getting that list together.
Well, if you can get that list of editors easily, then there's no need to dig into the scoreboard (I thought it would be complicated that's why I suggested the scoreboard...)
Let me know when you're ready to send the message and I'll prepare the list then. I won't share the list here because it would be unfair to identify all these editors.

For anybody who's interested, here are some statistics about editors in Ireland; we have (or have had) 720 editors in Ireland, of which:
  • 444 have edited something this year.
  • 61 are responsible for 100 or more segments.
  • 47 of those 61 have edited this year.
  • 22 are responsible for 1000 or more segments.
  • 20 of those 22 have edited this year.
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Post by davidg666
Something I just noticed about the new abbreviations list for Ireland: I think we could do away with Circus and Mount. I don't know of any roads with Circus in the name in Ireland, and Mount is very rare -in fact, most of the road names I can think of them that contain Mount in them shouldn't be abbreviated anyway.

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Post by davidg666
'evening everybody,

About two months ago (mid September), I sent a PM to about 45 active editors in Ireland (by "active", I mean editors who have been actively editing this year and who have edited at least 100 segments in their editing career). The PM pointed out this forum thread and asked them to give their opinions about the abbreviations proposed.

Unfortunately, only about half of those editors actually read the message, and I had just three responses. However, all three were positive.

Although all actie editors should (in my opinion) be visiting the forum regularly, it is still the only place we have to discuss things like this, and those editors who have contributed have had a good discussion.

Anyway, I think enough time has passed now, so I propose that we adopt the list of abbreviations in the wiki seven days from today (on 17 November). If anybody has anything to add to the discussion, then please comment now!

Stan, would you mind updating the wiki on the 17th to take out the warning that the abbreviations list is under discussion?

Everybody: from that date, please use the abbreviations list on the wiki page.

thank you all, and goodnight,

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Post by davidg666
lsin023 wrote:Just retested "Ave N", "Ln N", "St N", "Rd N".
I can confirm that the issue with suffix "N" has been fixed by Waze (Thanks Tim for the info)
Kate and Thomas pronounce "North" from now now on, no more "ehnn".
Don't forget to clear your cache by searching for "cc@tts" ;)
Wiki Ireland has been updated accordingly.
Excellent! Has anybody noticed yet if northbound motorway segments are pronounced properly now? I only drove southbound on motorways today (but I might get a chance to head north over the weekend).

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