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Post by vectorspace
dbraughlr wrote:...It is not a Forest Service road, it is a trail designated by the Forest Service.
"FS-" = "Forest Service trail"...
Yes... this was another reason I truncated FSR-XXX to FS-XXX because they have trails and roads. I am not advocating mapping "trails" but wanted something that was more generic that could handle both if the path would work in Waze. I just wasn't sure of the exact protocol, if any, between "road" and "trail" at this point. The online GIS system let's you pick type of vehicle to see which roads it can travel on, so that's kind of cool.
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Post by vectorspace
Thortok2000 wrote:...If the forest service roads are as bad as you say and shouldn't be used for through-driving, perhaps marking them 'private road' could be considered. This would prevent routing through them unless the destination requires it. And definitely 'dirt road' for the ones that aren't paved. ...
It's good you brought up this topic, which is somewhat covered on the Forest Service Road topic here in the forum and on the new (draft) Wiki page I am starting to edit.

I want to point out that these roads should be marked as highways, primary streets, and streets where appropriate because three out of the five classification levels of the roads (maintenance levels) are completely passable. We don't want to mark too many as dirt roads or 4x4 roads because they will become unavailable to routing that may be critical especially in western states or rural areas. The whole point of the Wiki, discussion, and debate with other editors, and champs is so we make a good group decision on how to suggest best practices for editing these roads. I don't want to presuppose the final answer as my initial thoughts may be bettered by other ideas.

I suggest that other than TTS comments on Forest Service Roads, we stop discussion on this thread and move it to: viewtopic.php?f=129&t=47655. The only discussion here should be about TTS.

I am in favor of keeping it simple and using FS-XXX from my background on this topic and the great discussion here too. Abbreviations are just that. We don't need formal English in all locations, although I have some appeal for the contrary arguments stated here.
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Post by vectorspace
To revisit requests for US Forest Service and Indian Reservation Roads, I did a partial test driving around on my local test range (abandoned neighborhood on a base) while navigating.

FS-xxx is currently pronounced the two letters as "eff, ess" then the remainder. This will be more flexible than FSR because it can be used in the future with trails as well as roads.

BIA-xxx is currently pronounced as a word, which sounds like "by - ya."

I forgot to test IRR and ITR, but will soon.

Here's what should be pronounced based upon my research and work with the two topics...

FS-xxx to be pronounced "Forest Service."
BIA-xxx to be pronounced "B, I, A" - just the letters.
IRR-xxx to be pronounced "Indian Reservation Road"
ITR-xxx to be pronounced "Indian Tribal Road"
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Post by vectorspace
I've had more interaction with Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) on road systems. A few things seem clear and would appreciate the following being done in the TTS spreadsheet.

(1) Remove ISR-xxx - Indian Service Route. This is archaic and not appreciated by the tribes.

(2) Add NTR-xxx Native Tribal Route. TR is used elsewhere as Township Road.
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Post by voludu2
Until the waze team is able to turn its attention to the "improving the TTS" issue, then, I think it makes sense to compile local lists of what, generally, we want -- to be able to put reasonable abbreviations in road names (like standard locally-appropriate for states and provinces in all countries around the world) without getting down to details like whether we need dots or spaces to make that work out right in the long run.

Because, until this issue gets a little bit further up the Waze team's list of priorities, those team members won't even have time to think about what they might want to work for, let alone how they might implement it.

The community effort to understand what is going on with TTS has gone on for 2 1/2 years now, and progress has been difficult and slow largely because the waze team is not yet ready to work on the issue. There have been bigger fish to fry, like frequent tile uploads and enabling drivers to add places from the app.

When improving TTS moves up the waze team's list, and they become more interested in encouraing crowd-sourced help from the WME community, we will recognize it because there will be:
A) A waze tester, probably built for the waze team, but which can accommodate a select few champ-chosen members to test arbitrary text (typical driving directions, current street names, hypothetical street names), and display the pre-TTS processing (in-house as well as 3rd party) and play back the TTS audio.
B) Information for the waze editors on the rules used in the in-house pre-TTS processor as well as in the TTS product to transform text before it is spoken.
C) A more-or-less steady stream of information about the approaches they might be considering to deal with the fact that different pre-TTS rules and pronunciations may be needed in different countries, so that we can understand better how to structure our effort to help.

Until that time, community work to discover out what TTS currently does, as well as what it is possible to wish for it to do instead, is going to continue to be slow and painful. I cannot imagine how many hours GizmoGuy41 and JennCard put into building their weird road grids and testing the TTS results. Even building the spreadsheet of things to test must have taken a long time. I'm glad no well-meaning editors deleted that 2/3 of the way through testing. This would be easier if it were to be done at a time when the waze team is willing to share the information it already has about how TTS works. And collaborate on reasonable tools for working with and understanding this information, and even on tools for testing the results of hypothetical changes to the TTS settings and rules.

Right now, we can wonder what we can wish for in terms of improvements (different abbreviations in different countries? A special TTS field that accommodates phonetic rendering? "New Castle, DE" and "Havre De Grace" both pronounced correctly?) but we're still pretty much lost in a fog until the waze team gives us some navigational guidance on where it might be willing to go with TTS.
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Post by voludu2
Inspecting all highway entrance and exit ramps around the world in order to change all the abbreviations is going to be a lot of work for a lot of editors. High-level editors, which are in short supply.

I think TTS is almost kind of sort of good enough for now, given what we have to work with. It IS laughable at times. Maybe there is a little information they can give to the editors, and a small number of abbreviation changes they can get from the editing community. Once waze is ready to make other changes, it would start to get a lot easier for the community to contribute to improving TTS.

That's all I'm saying. It took 100 pages for the community to come as far as it has on this topic, and that represents a lot of work behind the scenes. We only have so many hours in a day.
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Post by voludu2
I don't think we should give up. I think we should keep it simple, harvest the low-hanging fruit that the waze team has now made available, and wait for more improvements before taking on some the stuff that would take a lot of work and probably need to be re-done in couple years when waze makes some TTS improvements.
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Post by voludu2
How responsive are they to a TTS test interface, similar to the demo nuance provides on its website?

This would allow you to input strings and listen to the results immediately.

It would make it easier for them to provide the service they want to provide.
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Post by voludu2
Rather than a difficult-to-maintain spreadsheet:

Why not a bugzilla (or other bug/issue/feature ) tracking software. One which allows users to vote for the most important feature requests.

And anyone can see the summary report of all or "all open" or "by oldest" or "most popular" and moderators would have the power to merge duplicate requests with a click of the button.

This would be easier to share with the team, too.

Waze editors frequently use space on different unofficial waze-related servers in different parts of the world. I bet it would be possible to find a little space for this.

(And while we are at it, to set up useful issue tracking for other things like road closures, for which the sheet is very cumbersome)
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Post by voludu2
sketch wrote: Are you a client beta tester? We are not focusing on Samantha very much these days . . .
Whoa. Wow! Excellent. Samantha always sounds like she's talking through a blanket.
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