Pocket GPS World - SatNavs | GPS | Speed Cameras Forums-viewtopic-speed camera warnings

bazelk · Regular Visitor Joined: Feb 25, 2006 Posts: 80

The constant mis pronunciation from my TT 730 TTS is driving me mad, before having the TT I had a Garmin C510 TTS (Daniel) which was word perfect, inc street names.

Is there an alternative, I don't just mean the voice as they are all powered by the same TTS engine.

If Garmin can get it right why can't TomTom.

Robin2 · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 11:14 am Post subject:

My experience has been quite the contrary. Although Kate struggles with some Welsh place names (which is a source of innocent amusement to my wife and myself) she made a pretty good attempt at most French names during 4 weeks we spent there in the summer. I also use TTS warnings for my PGPSW speed cameras, and my only criticism is that Mobile sounds more like Modile. All in all, the TomTom TTS engine is about the most realistic I have ever heard - it even gets the intonation of words in a sentence correct - far better that the robotic voices you get elsewhere (eg CoPilot)
Robin
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TomTom One v3 Europe, Navcore 7.903, Western Europe 835.2420
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tenorplayer · Regular Visitor Joined: Aug 20, 2006 Posts: 69

I have to side with Robin on this one, my aging 910 and Kate is spot on. Lovely voice ! The only time it gets it wrong annoyingly is the pronunciation of my home town "Wallasey" i.e. wallasey rd, wallasey tunnel approach etc which it says as "WallEsey" . Not the TTs fault though as when I investigated the map data that TT uses , it had the incorrect spelling.
I don`t know if this has changed yet( although I did send several corrections) as I am still using my original old map.

mikealder · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 12:18 pm Post subject:

The TTS files for the 910 are unique though at 400MB+ for each voice, since the introduction of the x20 and newer devices the TTS file size is considerably less and whilst the voice is good its not as good as the speech quality you will have using a 910 - Mike

SpikeyMikey · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 12:28 pm Post subject:

I must agree with the OP. I use the Kate TTS voice on my 940 and it annoys me that street is pronounced strit and phone is pronounced phon amongst others.
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Mike
TT GO6000 (Europe); iPhone and iPad Pro with iOS TT GO & MyDrive + CamerAlert

dhn · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 1:23 pm Post subject:

When my wife used our 720 in Britain a few months ago, she reports that the computer voice used (Susan, US_en) kept pronouncing 'road' as 'rod'.
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DennisN · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 3:12 pm Post subject:

I'm trying to train Kate to pronounce London as "SouthernerSoftypants". Twisted Evil

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Dennis

If it tastes good - it's fattening.

Two of them are obesiting!!

flyingfuzz · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 7:54 pm Post subject:

Having worked for a company that produced a TTs system for reading emails I can testify just how difficult it is to get the correct pronunciations.
Our biggest issues were names and place names. We never had to deal with street names but I can believe they would be just as bad.

To give you some idea of what we had to do for an emal. Every email that came into the system we passed it through a pre-process filter to help make it easier to listen to. We would look for place or surnames and substitute the spelling with a pronunciation of the spelling. For example my surname is Burr, TTS tend to clip this to Brr so to get a better pronunciation we would substitute Burr to Burrrr to get the correct sound.

We also had to put several spaces before every full stop to stop TTS from clipping words. I guess things like “Road” suffer from this clipping.

Now I’m guessing that when a TT builds a route to creates a text file of all the turns and road/street names and processes each line of text as a manoeuvre. Depending on how each line is built will have some input into the quality of the spoken output.

Now to improve the TTS you would need to listen to each street and place name and adjust the spelling to get a better pronunciation. Sounds simple just sit a group of people to go through each street and place name, not so, place names can have a local pronunciation. Take my local village spelt Chineham, pronounced Chinham or even Chunham. Now if you don’t know that you cant change it and if you were from out-of-town you would expect to hear Chineham, so depending if you were local or not depends on what you expect to hear. Not an easy win what ever way you look at it.
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bazelk · Regular Visitor Joined: Feb 25, 2006 Posts: 80

I do understand all the complexities of a TTS but it still doesn't answer how come Garmin have got it right and TomTom haven't Confused

.

I have actually run the 2 units(TT 730 & Garmin C510) side by side just out of curiosity and that is when you realise just how bad the TomTom's TTS is.
In an ideal world I would like to just lift and convert the Garmin TTS to work on the TomTom.

I'm sure there are a lot of funny examples of pronunciations out there, I could also tell you some were my kids have said WHAT DID THAT JUST SAY Embarassed

(needless to say if you have some of that nature don't repeat them on here) but do keep the others coming.

gatorguy6996 · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 10:46 pm Post subject:

I can confirm that Bazelk's experience with the two TTS systems is typical. I've yet to find anyone running a Garmin nuvi side by side with any x20/x30/x40 TomTom that has found TomTom enunciation or pronunciation on par with Garmin's. Neither is perfect, but Garmin's is generally closer to correct. TomTom's speech volume is good, and in some cases better than Garmin's. Intonation/inflection is about the same on both, tho I prefer TomTom's Susan over Garmin's Jill (but not Aussie Karen Very Happy

). But the way some words are (mis)pronounced and the number of words that are clipped/garbled leaves TomTom's TTS a poor second to Garmin's speech engine.

Bazelk, I would guess the primary reason for the differences is that Garmin engineered their own speech engine designed specifically for navigation. TomTom chose not to, instead using a commercial "packaged" software from Loquendo that is supposed to be tweaked/adjusted by the software buyer for use with their specific application. Either TomTom is not spending enough time on those corrections and adjustments, or the control offered by Loquendo's user software is insufficient for changing actual pronunciations. I suspect the former.
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flyingfuzz · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 11:12 pm Post subject:

DennisN · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 11:49 pm Post subject:

flyingfuzz · Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2009 10:52 am Post subject:

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