Yesterday while watching one of those song identification YouTube videos, I encountered an artist going by the name “JVKE”, which is pronounced “Jake”. I noticed that VoiceOver does not pronounce his name “Jake”, it says “J V K E”, as one might expect. If I don’t capitalize the letters, I get a single syllable where the v is almost silent.
It got me thinking about the times Apple has taken it upon themselves to “fix” the pronunciations of stylized names. A good example is the Canadian rapper “BBNO$”, which Apple correctly substituted for “Baby No money”. But what are the real-world consequences of changing the pronunciation of a stylized name, instead of leaving it alone?
Let’s use my recent discovery of the JVKE song as an example. The stylized name is meant to be seen and not heard, so I can understand why changing the pronunciation might make sense. But I’m still consuming written words, just using a different medium. What if I then go on Reddit and talk about the “Jake” song I just found? No-one would have any idea what I was talking about. Some astute commenter would say “Wait, do you. Mean JVKE?” Which my phone would then read as “Wait, do you mean Jake?” If I knew to watch out for this sort of tomfoolery from Apple, I would probably check the spelling at that point and be suitably annoyed that my phone had tricked me into publicly misspelling the name. If I didn’t, I might reply to “Do you mean JVKE?” With “Yeah, isn’t that what I said?”. This is not a win for anyone.
Since my phone did not change the pronunciation of the name, I got to have an experience that is probably quite familiar: I had to learn the pronunciation myself. If I cared enough, I would change it in my phone’s dictionary, but I’m not going to.
I’m oversimplifying a bit here, but I feel like there are essentially two different camps of text-to-speech users—those who want things read to them and those who want to interpret. I want to interpret. I don’t want my phone to expand abbreviations or change names so they’re pronounced correctly, because then how would I know whether someone wrote “BTW” or “By the way”; “Washington” or “WA”; “Jake” or “JVKE”?
I’m curious to hear other perspectives on this, if they exist. The main counter argument in my head is “reduced cognitive load”, which is completely valid. Would you rather your phone just “fix” all the common mispronunciations for you, or would you rather learn about them yourself and make the decision on whether to fix them, even if that means being potentially confused by stylized words that break the laws of the language?
@simon I think abbreviations break more than they fix, honestly. Orpheus is good about that, it doesn't bother with very many at all. Mr and Dr for example, don't get expanded. They are what they are. I mean is it Doctor Jake or Drive Jake? Or Jake the Doctor or Jake the Drive? Also St. Is it Fish Saint or fish Street?
@FreakyFwoof Good point about St. and Dr. I always forget about those ambiguities because I have most interpretation layers turned off.
I do use the community dictionary in iOS because it only seems to change pronunciations in a way that is phonetically sound. For instance, it changes Schadenfreude, as it should, and it pronounces "Rihanna", "Zendaya", and "Bebe Rexha" correctly, but it doesn't change "Chvrches" because that's also stylized and there's no way to read those letters with any existing pronunciation rule and turn that into "Churches". The former examples seem like things the TTS could reasonably be expected to pronounce correctly anyway, and there are times when the synth's pronunciation actually teaches me how to say something I've been pronouncing wrong in my head for years, so I don't mind having that kind of exceptions list. But I could also understand the argument that "Eloquence has always said things incorrectly, I'm used to it and I'd rather just hear the original incorrect pronunciations". If I ever find that the community dictionary is overcorrecting, i'll turn it off.
@simon @FreakyFwoof I find that the dictionary does overcorrect. It says Darren as dar an. Also Motson as in John Motson the football commentator as Mosen.
@KaraLG84 @simon @FreakyFwoof I noticed Darren and then at some later point it was removed. I hear motson as mot sen. But no guarantee Apple is keeping them up to date. And we actually had somewhat of a debate about this recently with one particular case. The word 'id'. I argued it should be left alone, it had been made into ID (spelled) and I ran into it when encountering a question that mentioned Freud's work. This then kicked off an entire discussion that boils down to the interpreting versus correcting, and the common case. And probably will end up resting on a majority opinion. As it stands, the fully lowercase word 'id' has not yet been added to main to be spelled far as I can tell, though the uppercase Id has, as the entity Freud refers to always has an article, 'the id'. You could perhaps chime in on the issue for the main dict.
@x0 @simon @FreakyFwoof Oh yeah I forgot to add that those entries were removed but apple hasn't updated their copy.