In English news wire text, on average one word out of twenty is
non-standard, i.e. not simply made up of letters from the
English alphabet. Examples are abbreviations, numbers, dates,
times, and other measures. On top of these non-standard words
comes an endless list of (foreign) names of people, places,
products or companies, whose pronunciation is unknown and
potentially irregular. When confronted with unknown words,
modern text-to-speech engines try to guess the correct
pronunciation based on the written form of the word, sometimes
with weird results. In this post we show two - admittedly
contrived - example sentences, each with two pronunciations. The
first pronunciation is out-of-the-box, whereas the second one
benefits from a manually edited pronunciation dictionary. Here’s
the first sentence: Out of the box, it is pronounced like this:
sentence1_orig With the abbreviations ‘Maj.’ and ‘NYTimes’
expanded and phonetic transcriptions for ‘Netanyahu’, ‘Paypal’
and ‘GMail’, the sentence becomes much more com