Your Drives Have Never Been Smarter

Waze allows you to set the language…
select my waze → the wheel icon (top left of screen) → Voice & Sound. Also select Input language if you wish.

Limmojez…Limoges. :rofl:

Only one I remember because after that I muted the voice, best thing I ever did.

Wow, thanks. You’ve made my day!
Perfect French voice too although for some reason it has also attracted a lot of Chinese characters on each line.
Can’t have everything!

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Google is terrible for this - Ave Roger Dodin in Rennes has had the surname pronounced “Dodder”, “Do-Din (close but no cigar)”, or “Dod-in”, the Caen périphérique usually gets away with “perry-ferric” but occasionally seems to pick up stress on the last e and becomes “perry-feric-ah”.

Surely it is not beyond the wit of one of the biggest, most AI driven software outfits in the world to fix its app to use the pronunciation rules of the current country’s language.

As you might suspect, I so agree. I wrote to Google about it and received a ‘We have no current plans’ response.

Actually…

Thinking about it this is probably an issue for which a general solution does not exist.

I can best sum up the issue as - does an English speaking visitor to France want his sat nav to say “Paris” or “Par-ee”? If he wants it to say Paris, what should it say for “Roger Dodin” - “Ro-jay Do-dhan” or “Roger Dodin”, is the latter wrong because that is not how Dodin would have pronounced it?

For France it’s probably not that bad, a lot of French words (périphérique in my example above) follow English pronunciation rules well enough but others are a long way off (it took me some time to learn the pronunciation of words like “Montreuil”, for example).

Stray further from England and English and the and the differences grow - Athens vs Athena, Moscow vs Mos-k-va, Warsaw vs Varshava.

So you’d need a vocabulary of French places as known to the English, Spanish places as known to the French etc - the number of specific vocabularies would be the square of the number of languages you deal in which I suspect is impractical.

That said I do wish it would at least stick to a single wrong pronunciation, we end up playing a game of “what is it going to say this time”.

Ave Dodin is a particular problem because there are loads of roundabouts and Google says “leave the roundabout and continue along Ave Roger Dodin” for every single one of them and sometimes the pronunciation of Dodin can be different every single time.

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