Pronunciation Counts

A few weeks ago I downloaded a GPS program into my cell phone. It's awesome. As long as the satellites way up in the sky can find me I'll never get lost, even in cities I only visit once in awhile or have never visited before.

This program gives you real time driving directions. The satellites (you know... the ones way up in the sky) keep track of you while you drive and a synthetic female voice tells you when to turn and how far to drive.

Again: awesome.

Sometimes, however, the voice has problems with pronunciation. Especially with Spanish words.

For example:

Last weekend we went to San Diego and needed to drop my brother-in-law off at La Jolla Village Road in La Jolla.

We humans pronounce it "(LAH HOY-yah) Village Road."

The voice, on the other hand, pronounced it "Louisiana (JOL-lah) Village Road."

It took us several seconds to realize what the voice was saying. I could understand her saying (JOL-lah) -- most voice synthesizers speak phonetically. But "Louisiana"?

It finally dawned on me. "La" is the abbreviation for Louisiana. The voice only said this when we were on the freeway. Once off the freeway, she pronounced it "la". Apparently when you're on the freeway, any word that matches a state abbreviation must mean the state and not a Spanish pronoun.

I'm going to Hawaii in a few weeks. We're going to have fun having the voice pronounce various Hawaiian city and street names like "Likelike" (LEE-kay LEE-kay), "Hoopio" (ho-oh-PEE-oh) and "Kaaawa" (kah-ah-AH-va)...