Text to speech may need some hints to improve it

[davecraig]

The example of this issue I'm going to use here is soundscape:55.9552485,-3.1928911 which is near a road named "North St Andrew Lane". The text to speech is reading this out as "North Street Andrew Lane" instead of "North Saint Andrew Lane". An easy mistake to make and one that we could perhaps solve with a list of Saints?!

However, I suspect that there will be an endless list of this type of issue across all of the various locales and countries and so is there a better way to do it?

[davecraig]

The Vocalizer TTS app provides an alternate text to speech engine. It correctly says "North Saint Andrew Lane" and so is better than the Google default provider. There are numerous other possible engines - see https://accessibleandroid.com/tts-engines-on-android-past-present-and-future/ for a list. I've also tried Acapela Voices and CereProc from that list and both can work with Soundscape (I had to restart my phone to get CereProc to work). Only CereProc fails to say Saint instead of Street in the same way as Google, but its voice is very nice.

[davecraig]

Another interesting data point in text to speech. If I use Cerevoices TTS engine then:

"Cafe.Main street goes left"

is read out as

"Cafe dot main street goes left"

If I put a space after the dot, then it's left as a pause. Google TTS doesn't need the space as a hint. We probably need to add a check on the resource strings to try and ensure any issues like this we find are tested against.