Different Street Names Being Spoken

Jack is an "American English" voice so the speech engine assumes Penn is short for Pennsylvania, just like PA would be spoken as the full name. Karen plays by Aussie rules where they don't have a Pennsylvania but they do know of William Penn.

I never noticed it.... but it makes sense.

I'll try to pay attention to see if it happens to me.

Greetings

In addition to the "interesting" handling of abbreviations, when you use voices from other countries, there are a number of other differences as well.

I prefer Emily, which is the British female voice.

The first time I used her on a highway, I had to look up what a "slip road" was.

( Noun 1. slip road - a short road giving access to an expressway slip road - a short road giving access to an expressway; "in Britain they call an access road a slip road" )

Regards
SS0700

I reported this as a bug. Most American English voices convert "Penn" to Pennsylvania. It gets old when you live in PA and every other street is named after the old Quaker, fondly called William Pennsylvania, by Garmin.

They said they were aware of the bug and inferred they might fix it someday.

I deliberately use the female Aussie voice on my Nuvi; what with the other radios and things going in the car, that voice is distinctive.

But...

She does have a problem, particularly pronouncing street names reflecting Spanish heritage... Cahuenga boulevard? But then again, those are *quite* distinctive, and often humorous, so they do catch my attention.

It does do the same with Jack or Jill. I wish the Homer Simpson download spoke street names, that would be perfect.

I've heard that and I thought she said "slick" road so I slowed down . I wonder how she knows the road is slippery. It never rains in Southern California.

Another story, there's a Thai restaurant in Hollywood called "Pa Ord". An American voice (Jill?) pronounces Pennsylvania Ord.

I've never encounter a situation like this but I can imagine if I live and drive around where others are, it would be incredibly annoying to hear it frequently. I'm sure Garmin "may" get around to it, depending on the next rollout, etc.

The closest annoyance for me is just the occasional difference in pronouncing streets vs the way I say them.

Some of the pronunciations are based on some internal rules derived from the street names. One example is:
Dr = Drive
Dr. = Doctor

If the municipality that reports the street names to the mapping agencies adds that period in the abbreviation, you'll get Abercrombie Doctor pronounced instead of Abercrombie Drive.

Making a 'fix' in the speech engine won't help much when the street names themselves aren't always consistent.

Besides just having a different accent, the different voices will use local expressions to match what local people would say. Depending on where you are (and what voice you have selected) a 'Roundabout' may be known as 'Traffic Circle' or 'Rotary' in different locales. We're doing a lot more than just choosing a pleasing voice.

There's a street in the Des Moines, IA area that is George M Mills Civic Parkway - and the initial "M" is treated as a Roman numeral... and the GPS says "George the 1000th Mills..." Now I don't know if the data in the map has "M." or "M"...

Geo Wash Mem Parkway for the George Washington Parkway as it showed on the map as GeoWashMemPkwy.

Try driving in Mexico and see what some roads/street names become. Sometimes I wonder if the voice will break its tongue trying to pronounce a name! Regardless of Jack, Jill or Karen. LOL