Waze forum

Hi Localizers,
I never experienced Waze with street names, or voice commands in Egypt. Accept my apology if I missed something.

1) TTS issue:
I have both TTS engine & google voice recognition installed and working great with any other app.
I know that I must choose any waze voice that support street names from its own list.
but Waze in Egypt, has no option to download such voices! all the waze voice list has no "street name" facility..
I'm using android & the waze/TTS folder contains only 3 files, one of them (the *.db one) is zero size..
what that would be? are those voices restricted in some countries? may we ask for them?


2) Voice command issue:
the Waze works great with voice search.. but there is no accessibility for voice commends.. I tried both (waving twice and 3 fingers tabbing) but for some reason voice command is not working and I couldn't troubleshoot further.

Please Advice

no1ne wrote:1- waze's voices and voice recognition engine are from google but relie on waze's implementation in waze app, so if egyptian is not available in setting list you can't have it

hello no1ne,
when I said "Egypt" I meant geographic location, not a language..
example: if you travail to Egypt you would lose the "street names" voices, even if your app was English in language settings.

Edit:
I notice another issue, it may be relevant,
when i install waze (in Egypt) it auto download English+Hebrew instead of English+Arabic
Egypt is near Israel, but they use Arabic as a default language (not Hebrew)
should I report this as a bug? Please Advice

Dear AlObaili,
Yes, you are right. but I'm trying to make the TTS run with English (Not Arabic)
please go to: settings - Voice Directions, then tell me:
can you see a voice called "Jane" in English voices? or you have the same situation in KSA?

I've done what no1ne suggest.. it shows empty drop-down menu instead of languages
this mean TTS is not locally supported in any language, right?

AlObaili wrote:I can see that in no1ne's area there are multiple languages supported. How does this actually work? Can I enter more than one primary name and click the speaker icon for each to set the language?

if you noticed, all those languages are using "Latin characters"
I think multi-lang would give different pronunciation for the same Latin street name.

Thanks for your clarification, fuchserl

One thing that still confuses me:

fuchserl wrote:In the app street names are only output in the (one) set TTS language of the app, no matter in which country you are.

are you sure of the red statement? if so, why English TTS is not working in certain countries?

TTS and voice commands are enabled in each country as they become ready. If TTS and voice commands are not available in Egypt, this means they are not supported yet in Egypt.

If I'm correct, Arabic is the local language in Egypt, but TTS and voice commands are not yet supported for Arabic. Currently in Arabic, you can only use your voice to search for places.

I think if the local community agrees to add TTS and voice commands in languages other than Arabic, it is possible by asking the localization team directly, but I think it is best to wait for Arabic support since street names in Egypt are in Arabic.

I'm not sure if it is possible to add support for more than one language (e.g. English + French + Arabic when available) to one country.

Al-Janoubie wrote:Dear AlObaili,
Yes, you are right. but I'm trying to make the TTS run with English (Not Arabic)
please go to: settings - Voice Directions, then tell me:
can you see a voice called "Jane" in English voices? or you have the same situation in KSA?

No, I can't see the "Jane" voice in Saudi Arabia. The dropdown list in WME speaker icon doesn't show any language, too. This does mean that TTS is not supported for any language in Saudi Arabia.

no1ne wrote:you can see tts language enabled in you driving area

in WME : https://www.waze.com/editor/ (require your waze credential to access)
create/select a segment
edit it
clic on speaker
then on drop menu

Capture d’écran 2017-08-06 à 17.24.47.png

here you can listen tts rendering

I can see that in no1ne's area there are multiple languages supported. How does this actually work? Can I enter more than one primary name and click the speaker icon for each to set the language?

AlObaili wrote: I can see that in no1ne's area there are multiple languages supported. How does this actually work? Can I enter more than one primary name and click the speaker icon for each to set the language?

In the WME you can only test, how street names are spoken in various languages. this is not to set anything for the app.
In the app street names are only output in the (one) set TTS language of the app, no matter in which country you are.

You can, however, create / have Waze create abbreviations with conditions for several languages, so that signs/abbreviations that are used in your country, e.g. ">" for direction/Richtung/richting/direcion/direzione or the airplane sign for airport, are output in several languages, depending on what TTS language is set in the app of the user

As far as I know and as I experienced when I was last year abroad in a country with another language, if my TTS language is set to German it will pronounce street names in Italian or Dutch with German pronounciation.
I don't know if there are any limitations to this functionality, if some TTS languages are restricted to certain countries or such. I am sure it will not work if the street names are in another script that the TTS language is not made for (e.g. English with arabic, kyrillic etc)