Enunciation quality of x40 TTS voices

DaveMatthews · Regular Visitor Joined: Dec 25, 2004 Posts: 221

Hi all.

I'm putting togther a review of my 940 (to submit to this site later this month) and although I think it's a brilliant bit of kit in many ways, its biggest letdown for me is the TTS. My previous SatNav was a NavMan S90i which was an utter disaster in most respects but its TTS was noticeably better. I'd like to ask whether people agree with the following observations of TTS on the x40 range or perhaps it's simply something being out of kilter on my own unit...

(I'm using the "Kate" voice)

While generic instructions (such as "Turn left", "Turn around as soon as possible", "Keep right", etc) are enunciated clearly, street name pronunciation is frequently strange and/or unclear. The most obvious problem is that of vowel sounds being dropped or changed. For example "Lancaster Street" is pronounced as "Lankster Strit". Sometimes this is exacerbated by two words being prounounced as one (eg "Main Street" becomes "Minstrit", while "Peel Lane" becomes simply "Plane"!!!). Some consonants are similarly mis-handled, for example "Crag Road" is announced as "Crack Road", while "Upfield Lane" mangles the vowels and loses the "D" to become "Upfill Lane". The unit can also read aloud weather reports but the pronunciation of the words "celcius" and "temperature" is hilariously wobbly!

Deleting and reinstalling the voice and a full reset of the unit did not address these faults.

When actually reaching a junction, the road name is often NOT repeated for some reason - I can't fathom any predicatable pattern to this behaviour.

The ultimate measure of success for TTS is whether I have to look at the screen to clarify the street names - and sadly I frequently do. Actually I found the "Simon" voice to be ever so slightly better in that although it made the same mistakes, the diction of consonants is generally clearer.

OK, that's my critique - fair or foul?

--

Cheers,

Dave

mikealder · Posted: Sun Mar 08, 2009 4:06 pm Post subject:

Dave, thats quite an accurate summary of the TTS on the devices at the moment. The best TTS voices IMO were those offered with the 910 device, but they consumed a whopping 4GB of the hard drive space, each single voice file was around 400MB! - The current TTS voice files are only around 10% of this value - Mike

andy-c1 · Posted: Sun Mar 08, 2009 4:28 pm Post subject:

trying typing in "natwest" Laughing Out Loud

brings out the weirdest pronunciation

but I suppose it does come down to space on a unit and what can be done or not or maybe it slows down everything being a huge voice file
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flyingfuzz · Posted: Sun Mar 08, 2009 6:35 pm Post subject:

Having worked on a TTS solution for reading emails I can tell you that we had to do a lot of pre-processing of the text before we ran this through the TTS engine.
Most of the pre-processing work revolved around adding extra spaces between words to prevent it sounding like words were joined together, a space gave an amount of time before the next word was spoken so more spaces a bigger pause.
But the biggest work around we had to do was around place and surnames. To get the correct pronunciation required attempting new spellings to get the TTS to sound right. At the end of the day some place names spelling looked nothing like the original spelling.

For example the place Chineham is pounced Chinham.

DaveMatthews · Regular Visitor Joined: Dec 25, 2004 Posts: 221

Andy_P · Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 10:51 pm Post subject:

My five pennyworth....
I can understand why some of our place names could easily give it problems, but I quite agree they could have tried a bit harder with words they KNOW it is going to have to say, like "Temperature" and "Celsius"!

Also, have you noticed there is a menu selection to report bad pronunciation?
But whenever I've tried to use it, when it repeats the word and asks if this is the word that is wrongly pronounced... it says it completely differently!

I think it's yet another case of the processor getting overloaded and the speech starts to give up.

DaveMatthews · Regular Visitor Joined: Dec 25, 2004 Posts: 221

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gatorguy6996 · Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 6:41 pm Post subject:

While I find the Garmin 7x0 speech much easier to understand and more accurate in it's pronunciation than my TT930. Different strokes as ever.
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DaveMatthews · Regular Visitor Joined: Dec 25, 2004 Posts: 221

Testing out the theory that the processor isn't powerful enough to handle vocals properly, I switched off all but the very basic options for navigation mode and found an ever so slight improvement - "Peel Lane" was no longer pronounced as "Plane", for example. Overall, though, it's still not as good as NavMan, hence Mike's theory that it's simply space-saving short-cuts in the voice file encoding seems to be the culprit.

--

Cheers

Dave

Andy_P · Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 2:58 am Post subject:

Have you tried the "Simon" voice, Dave? for some reason it seems significantly better at not chopping the ends off words.

Re: reporting errors

Skwark · Regular Visitor Joined: Jan 30, 2005 Posts: 86

TTS is one of those things that grates with me... pronunciation doesn't seem consistent and sometimes it seems to get overexcited and almost shout some names or read them out in a higher tone than normal.

Going back home towards Hull it pronounces it more like "Hole". Some would agree that's quite appropriate Wink

but still it's a basic word even for a place name and you would have thought it could have coped!

The biggest issue I find is cutting off words and instructions, very irritating and forces you to take your eyes off the road sometimes to try and work our what it was trying to tell you!

AndyVaughan · Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 11:22 pm Post subject:

At least it doesn't stutter as much on the x40s!

Andy

DaveMatthews · Regular Visitor Joined: Dec 25, 2004 Posts: 221

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