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Post by GizmoGuy411
beej666 wrote:i still don't understand how the fix gets made. i've been made to understand that somebody from the Google Waze team will need to fill out some sort of request upstream with the TTS provider. who is that person? how does my request get in their inbox?
You can submit a request here and a handful of US Champs who have access will test and evaluate the request and submit our findings to Waze if we find a solution.

Waze does not need to submit to the TTS provider. They can make the changes themselves directly to their own TTS server that runs the software for the Nuance TTS software provider.

Please be aware that we generally do not try to fix the pronunciation of street names, as any change we submit will be system wide. Since many street names are pronounced differently in different locales it is often not prudent to change them.

The name "Lima" for example is sometimes pronounced "lye-ma" in some locations and "lee-ma" in others. The best we can hope to accomplish is to pick the most prevalent use.

Even when we feel a name SHOULD be changed, we need to research every instance of the name in the U.S. to determine the local usage before we make changes.

Your comment about the method of submitting TTS corrections is valid. I'll consider creating a form for submissions to rectify that.
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Post by GizmoGuy411
Previous TTS issues discussed with Nick.
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Post by GregoryKoch
Well, this is a weird one and I have no idea how it's happening. Jaguar Trail in Falls Church, Virginia (or at least the segment adjacent to Arlington Boulevard) is being pronounced "Jaguaxr" like there's a random X in there, but the name is displaying and stored correctly. Note that although it has a Falls Church address, it is in Fairfax County, not Falls Church City, so look at those GNIS references if you have to. I have no idea how that's happening. A less egregious error is Patrick Henry Drive (which is partially in Arlington and partially in Fairfax County with a Falls Church address) and it's pronouncing the first two letters like "Pay", which is obviously not how you pronounce Patrick.
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Post by Grid64
I double checked the wiki and noticed I have a street in Florida here with the abbreviation Cll for Calle and the WME editor pronounces it as Calle. However, I won't be able to test it in the app soon. I am replacing the street to Calle as it matches the County's GIS and Property Appraiser but I was wondering if Spanish abbreviations for streets (Calle, Avenida, etc.) were supported in the app? It's fairly common to see these street names in Florida.
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Post by HandofMadness
Got a UR today reporting "Cord Ave" was being pronounced "Country Road Avenue".
https://www.waze.com/editor/?env=usa&lo ... 413&zoom=5

Pretty sure the abbreviation should be "Co Rd".
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Post by harling
Having written my share of regexps and parsers, it occurrs to me that if we are going to use the period/full-stop '.' character to differentiate 'N' ("north") from 'N.' ("enn") or 'St' ("street") from 'St.' ("saint"), we also need to decide whether it should have to be followed by a space. For example, should it recognize 'St.Louis' (no space) as "Saint Louis"?

Unless someone can think of a good reason to allow '.' mid-word, I think the '.' should double as a delimiter (i.e., a space should not be required), if only for the sake of saving screen real estate. "N Street" would be written as either 'N.St' or 'N. St'.
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Post by harling
WeeeZer14 wrote:And I think the period after the single letter indicating that it should be the letter is confusing. Plenty of signs out there that use N. to mean North and S. to mean South etc.
For the sake of clarity and reliability, you are right that we should try to minimize overloading (e.g., 'N' vs. 'N.'), and try to minimize positional semantics (e.g., handling "St" differently depending on where it appears). The more "common sense" we try to build into it, the more complicated the code is to implement it, and the more likely fixing one problem will break something else.
BTW, maybe we should find out how these are handled:
So. (South)
No. (North)
Those would be good options to reduce overloading in street names, but we still need to address how to write "enn street" in a way that is readable, without breaking the existing database that uses 'N' for "north".
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Post by harling
bgodette wrote:Basically there needs to be positional awareness for handling things like St, Dr, N/S/E/W. Can anyone think of a name where St isn't Saint unless it's at the end of the name and therefore Street? Same thing for Dr.
'Storrow Dr E' is supposed to be "storrow drive east", not "storrow doctor east" or "storrow doctor ee". And each time someone comes up with an example that we haven't anticipated, the rules (and code) become messier and harder to maintain.

All these conditions and exceptions are easy enough for a human to follow, but to a computer, context-sensitive grammars are brittle. Trust me, I have done this for a living. Better to start now with as straightforward and literal a system as possible, or it will turn into a perpetual problem, where fixing one case will break several others.
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