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Re:English has been my pain for 15 years (2013) by retrac on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @10:05AM (#29650245)
Yes, I was thinking of speech synthesizers when I wrote my comment :) Closing the gap is devillish and requires increasingly complex grammatical analysis and more and more rules. One of the big barriers for early speech synthesizers was enough RAM/ROM to cram all the text-to-phonetic transformation rules.

I believe that modern approaches mostly use deep learning. And definitely still aren't perfect. I don't use speech synthesizers regularly personally as a tool, but synthesized speech is common enough that I do hear obvious stress errors in synthesized speech every day. Probably because English orthography is most opaque about stress, which basically doesn't exist as far as the writing system is concerned.

Re:English has been my pain for 15 years (2013) by aasasd on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @12:06PM (#29652073)
> synthesized speech is common enough

I'm curious: where do you encounter much synthesized speech? In my ‘fairly general’ usage (if there is such a thing), I only hear it in YouTube tutorials when the author is totally reluctant to both use their voice and do on-screen text.

Re:English has been my pain for 15 years (2013) by retrac on Thursday December 23, 2021 @09:54AM (#29662377)
Bus stop announcements on transit, those annoying interactive phone menus, people asking Siri math questions they should be able to do in their head, stuff like that.