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Post by GizmoGuy411
invented wrote:Does TTS say "1st" "2nd" "3rd" et al as expected?
Good question. It looks like we never tested for them.

My testing is on hold for a while as I need to catch up with other matters.

I'll have to at least add them to the list for future testing.

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Post by GizmoGuy411
CBenson wrote:
GizmoGuy411 wrote:
Yes that is a surprise. Maryland has quite a few more abbreviations than the fed list too. I looked my state of Ohio, and our abbreviation list is a copy of the federal list.

I supposed to do the our list right we should look at these for EVERY state. I'm afraid however I'm not up to the task, as our current list represents a fair amount of effort to date, and with only 35% tested so far, there will be a lot more to test once the map tiles are updated again.

Would anyone like to compare the MUTCD list for every state against our list and submit any additional abbreviations we should add?

http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/resources/sta ... /index.htm
It appears that Maryland is the only state to add a bunch to the fed list. So this doesn't look to be such a problem.
Whew! Thanks for checking on that! Yes that will make things easier.
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Post by GizmoGuy411
AndyPoms wrote:
GizmoGuy411 wrote:
AndyPoms wrote:I have several exits here in CT that say "N. Y. City"... I was listening closely today and I got "North Why City" through the TTS... Without me testing 75 variations, does anyone know a way to keep some form of "N. Y." (NY, N.Y., etc) for the display and get it to read "New York" in the TTS?

Thanks for your help,
Andrew
Look at the abbreviation list linked in the lead post of this thread. I think it has been updated to include the abbreviation for New York that works.

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For New York the doc says:

New York NY CU 2012-02-19 n/a. Says the letters 2012-03-22 GizmoGuy411 A
New York Ny CU 2012-02-19 New York 2012-03-22 GizmoGuy411 R

If I read that correctly, "NY" says "enn why" (and it should be Added) and "Ny" says "New York" but the recommendation is to Remove it?

The other thing I noticed while looking at the State List (and if I'm reading this wrong, please let me know) is that you want to add "Ct" to be "Connecticut" instead of "court" which is currently does. Being from Connecticut, we have many roads named "Something Court" and the USPS abbreviation is "Ct" for "Court" (but it's also missing from the "C" section of the list...
You were correct to point out that in the State list that "Ct" was tagged as to be "Added". That was clearly a copy and paste error!

"CT" should be Connecticut, and "Ct" should be Court.

Yes "Ct" was missing from the "C" section as the official USPS abbreviations are all in upper case. When the list was initially created, the entire USPS list was imported as is into the spreadsheet, and everything was left in upper case, and the mixed case variation of "Ct" was never added.

USPS actually use "CT" for both the state and the word! Not a problem for them, as they don't have to worry about TTS. Yes a problem for Waze!

Similarly, "NY" should be "New York" and "Ny" should removed as the current TTS abbreviation for New York, and we should avoid using it in Waze, as Harlan reiterated.

And again for now, our motto of "when in doubt, spell it out" is often the best advice as Alan said.

So thanks Andy for pointing out the errors/omissions in the list. I'm sure there are more if anyone cares to help proof it!
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Post by GizmoGuy411
I have still not had time to merge the remainder of Jencard's excellent work into the list.

(see: http://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php ... 40#p158721)

She has sure bested me with her test method and with her radial layout of her test rig.

Based on her results, I have begun to wonder if I could revise my own rig to be a variation of hers.

However since I don't own a vacation home in a remote location adjacent to a ski area, I can't sit in my computer room and test the rig roads that are a mile away from me. I have to drive to my test rig.

To overcome that slight issue, it occurred to me that I MAY be able to change the test roads to railroads and intersect them all in front of my house. They could follow a single path from that intersection to my rig area, where I could then fan them out and create non railroad naming stubs as Jen has done for visibility to select on the client. (For those who are not aware, railroads are visible in the editor but not on the client maps.)

So does anyone know if it is possible to still route to a named railroad or route to a road via a railroad? I don't know of any near me to test with, as I have long ago removed any intersecting nodes of railroads from the drive-able roads. I will add a test for this, however it would be nice to know before waiting for the edit to live turn around time to elapse.
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Post by GizmoGuy411
invented wrote:So it seems putting single quotes around a cardinal letter gets it to say the letter? what about multiple, capitalized letters put together? eg.

Code: Select all

'NEWS' Rd
would be North East West South Road or Enn Eee Doubleyou Ess Road?

edit: seems that uppercase anything produces the cardinal direction in your testing. boo-urns.

Actually it is worse! :(

For N, E, S, and W, the only way to say the letters is with lower case and single quotes. Just about everything other combination says the cardinal letters.

Some abbreviations seem to be not only case sensitive and quote type sensitive, but are even positionally sensitive. It makes for rather messy test rig.

Jencard, has tested a number of these, and I have set up my test rig with a slew of tests for variations of the letters "st". While they are now available for testing in the test rig, I have not had time to field test the results, or intergrate the results from Jencard.

To make things worse yet, few of her results seemed to be different than mine. More work will be required to see why they appear to be different.

If you read her post above, you will see some of the general conclusions she posted.
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Post by GizmoGuy411
xteejx wrote:Actually, enclosing N/E/S/W in brackets also makes it say the directions.
Actually did not know that. However it is not surprising, as almost any representation of them produces the cardnal directions.

Unfortuneatly, on the other hand, so far, the only way we have found (primarily with Jen's testing) to get TTS to speak N, E, S, and W, as letters of the alphabet is by enclosing the lowercase letter desired in single qoutes. Not exactly optimal.
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Post by GizmoGuy411
AlanOfTheBerg wrote:I thought we decided long(er) ago that differentiation should be with the period or without. Positional should make no difference. St=street, St.=saint, Dr=drive, Dr.=Drive, etc. Why make it more complicated?
I think I missed that post of yours way back when. Yes you are correct. However the list i posted for positional testing of variations of "st" was just to learn how TTS currently behaves.

And you are very correct. We definitely want to avoid any any TTS variations due to position.

It is already so complicated that we have had to resubmit variations for testing multiple times, and we still don't have a definitive answer. (Well maybe we do, but we have not heard every TTS result of the last tests yet.)
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Post by GizmoGuy411
The majority of jenncard's testing results from 2012-03-22 have now finally been added to the list.

This brings the list to 725 items for testing, with 719 entered into WME, and 523 or 72% of those actually tested.

Google Docs Spreadsheet:
Text-to-Speech (TTS) Abbreviations in Waze Clients - Test List for North America
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Post by GizmoGuy411
xteejx wrote:Can't see from phone if it's there, but Cr gives County Road. Annoying here as it's our convention for Crescent.

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Yes you are correct. The TTS result for "Cr" is "County Road". Also as an example, "CR-123" would say "County Road One Two Three".

For "Crescent" the USPS and Canada Post both use "Cres" for their official abbreviation. Waze also recognizes "Cres" with the TTS output of "Crescent". So, it looks like "Cres" is our best option on this side of the pond. There are also some longer, less optimal abbreviations that are commonly used for "Crescent" that are in our test list, but have not been tested yet. Of course all this is for North America, and not for across the pond. Hopefully someday you will have your own TTS server.
YouTube Video of the hilarious British Daniel talking for Waze!
xteejx wrote:Is there no way Waze would be willing to allow direct access to the TTS API so this could all be tested easily? Or at least give us a list of the exceptions they have in place. From that, we can conclude that everything else will be said the same as on the Nuance Vocalizer Demo online.
As far as direct access to the TTS exceptions, I have a feeling that Waze has made changes on their end and they have not necessarily documented them. From what I have read, Nuance provides a tool to make such changes, however Waze has not found a way to provide the tool to us. Plus there are two issues. Exceptions should be just that. Such a tool could provide us with a way to change the TTS on a per segment basis, but not with the global TTS result.

The global (as in country TTS server wide) TTS results for abbreviations would still need to be handled by Waze and or Nuance. From our communications with Waze at the Palo Alto meet-up, they do NOT have a list of the known TTS results. That is one reason why we are doing it ourselves.

And using the Demo at Nuance is not much help either. The Demo is not for their custom "Automotive" package, which I assume it what Waze is using for TTS. So anything we test in the Demo, could be different from the Nuance Automotive solution, and further different as a result of the exceptions added by Waze.
On Sat 2012-Feb-18, 01:02:55, GizmoGuy411 wrote:For those who would like to hear Samatha or Tom (plus others) convert text to speech, here is link to Nuance's interactive demo of their "Vocalizer for Netrork 5" product. Note that although the database is similar, it is not customized with their automotive product, or with Waze customizations.

Interactive TTS Demo: http://www.nuance.com/vocalizer5/flash/index.html

The sister product that Waze appears to use, is Nuance's "Vocalizer for Automotive" (no demo found), that has a preconfigured database customized for automotive use, and includes their Vocalizer Studio, which allows for a customization like several people in the various threads here about TTS have talked about; "it also allows customized text processing and the creation of user dictionaries for exception pronunciations."

The Nuance Language Portfolio for their Automotive Services, for the US English in the Americas, shows Samantha and Tom which Waze uses and Lisa who is not available in Waze. Check it out for other voices.

Edited 2012-05-09 to include additional relevant links to Nuance.
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Last edited by GizmoGuy411 on Wed May 09, 2012 7:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Post by GizmoGuy411
invented wrote:Confirmed that "3rd Street" comes out as "Third street"
That is good news. Now I wonder how far we should test to. I suppose a look at New York City would be the best guess for max.

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