Waze forum

This morning Waze was pronouncing I-35E N as I-35 eeee ennn. It has always gotten the "north" right before today. Something is broken.

I had my first UR today about the change to the expansion of "FM" in Texas. The person didn't seem to be disturbed only confused.

GizmoGuy411 wrote:And for full disclosure, you can all blame me for the "NE" and "FM" oversights. I was over confident that they had been cross checked a long time ago against any conflicts.

FM is now pronouncing as Farm to Market again. Thanks!

mdavidsonjr wrote:Any thing new on this FM error. We are getting a lot of UR's around the Houston area of this.

I have had FM work correctly for me recently. I had dumped my cache on my iPhone just to be sure. I haven't had a UR about it in the Austin area for over 10 days. There were 5 or 6 before that. I didn't think to check to see if "FM nnn" and "FM-nnn" work the same. It is always possible that one works and the other doesn't.

I had thought that "N." and "N" at the beginning of a street name now were pronounced "en" and "North" respectively, but apparently not. I have been experimenting with N Avenue in Plano, TX near my office (Permalink). Apparently, it still is pronounced "North" when you have the "N.".

Do I have to put it back to 'N' to get it to pronounce correctly? I really hate having to do that.

For at least the last two months, my Waze iOS app has been mispronouncing the San Francisco, California (USA) street name "Fell" as "Fayel".

How is this corrected? Is it something I can do myself?

I see various postings in the Waze forums about mispronounciation of place names, many mentioning the client TTS tables. But I have not yet figured out where or to whom I should address such issues, thus my creation of this new topic.

GizmoGuy411 wrote: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

sketch wrote:Unless that state's DOT is particularly sadistic, there aren't going to be three roads with the same number at that intersection.

So...close...

sketch wrote:Haha, well, of course business routes and spurs are often going to have the same number.

It's not fair to explain the rules after the game is already underway...

@All re: forest service roads. Just call it "Forest Service" and be done with it. Vectorspace put the time in for the research, has spoken with FS personnel, and obviously has the experience to back up his initial recommendation of just using "Forest Service". Even though FS personnel use FSR and vectorspace doesn't care either way, a quick search yields five road maintenance levels. They are all called "Forest Service Roads" in the sense that the Forest Service maintains them, and they are probably so busy maintaining them that they likely don't have time to waste behind a desk arguing about what they are called... Level 5 is what we would typically think of as a road while Level 1 is the scary, vegetation-covered, overgrown trail no one wants to walk down let alone drive down (if they could...) at night. In addition to redundancy and the other arguments for using "Forest Service" instead of "Forest Service Road" with TTS, hearing "road" is a disservice to the standard driver because we already have a preconceived idea of what a "road" should be. And these "roads" run the gamut from highways to non-existent.

Sketch referenced "emm" for Michigan state highways, so maybe my ear is just trained differently, but when I hear something like "M-36", I know that it is a road maintained by the state even if it is not announced as a state highway. In this case, it is just an entity maintained by the forest service. Once someone hears "Forest Service" more than once, they'll get used to the instruction even if it initially sounds foreign to their ear. And chances are they won't have cell reception for many of these roads, so they won't hear it anyway...

dbraughlr wrote:I would expect BI- to be pronounced bee eye without a TTS abbreviation translation.
My proposal is to add "BI-" to the TTS translation so that it is read how ever it is that we want it to be read, and to the shield translation to get a green shield.

When I first started Wazing, I was very frustrated with numerous "Bus" TTS instructions where I drove. When I ranked high enough and became an AM, anything in my assigned area with "Bus" (per the Road Naming (USA) wiki page...) transitioned to "Business" spelled out like txemt stated.

"Business" is understandable to the ear whether it is a loop or a spur. I know that "Business Interstate" encompasses both loops and spurs, but in my region, that term is not used. We just say "Business Loop" and "Business Spur" depending on the route. Is "Business Interstate" used in common speech and signage outside of the Midwest? If so, I would be fine with "BI" but would likely still retain "Business" on local route names so as not to interfere with "loop" and "spur" signage and local speech. Perhaps add "BL" and "BS" to supplement?