Our Lady of the Highway: A linguistic mystery
Current text-to-speech systems are pretty good. Their output is almost always comprehensible, and often pretty natural-sounding. But there are still glitches.
This morning, Dick Margulis sent an example of one common problem: inconsistent (and often wrong) stressing of complex nominals:
We have a winding road that we drive with our Google Maps navigator on, to keep us from taking a wrong turn in the woods. We have noticed that "West Woods Road" is rendered with a few different stress patterns as we go from turn to turn, and we can't come up with a hypothesis explaining the variation. Attached is a recording. It's a few minutes long because that's how long the trip takes. The background hum is the car.
I've extracted and concatenated the 11 Google Maps instructions from the four minutes and five seconds of the attached recording:
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