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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?