Pronunciation of Justin Trudeau: Juh-stin TROO-doh, with a stress on the first syllable and the second syllable rhyming with "trew."
French daily newspaper, Le Monde, has introduced a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system for its readers to listen to articles since 2022. However, the system faces significant challenges when it comes to pronouncing non-French names correctly.
The TTS system, optimised for standard French phonetics and vocabulary, often fails to accurately pronounce foreign or non-standard names due to a lack of context or pronunciation guides. This results in mispronunciations such as "social network X" being read as "social network ten", "Broglie affair" as "de Breuille", and "Afrikaner" as "afrikané".
To address these issues, corrections are made "by hand" and on the fly. The newspaper's Correction service now corrects not only spelling, typographical, and grammatical errors, but also pronunciation errors. Listeners are encouraged to report sound transcription errors at the end of each article's listening to aid in these corrections.
The TTS system's mispronunciations are not always in line with French reading rules, leading to errors such as "the nuns' nuns" instead of the correct French pronunciation. Artificial intelligence often makes pronunciation errors, such as "we edited beautiful editions", "this man is proud, can we trust him?", "pluss" instead of "plu", "ultraviol" instead of "ultraviolent", and "eighty-h'ans" instead of "eighty-z'ans".
Despite these challenges, the TTS system allows readers to access Le Monde's articles on various platforms, including bathroom, metro, bike, car, or during a morning jog. The system's flexibility in delivery is a significant advantage, even as efforts continue to improve its accuracy.
In conclusion, French newspapers like Le Monde face notable challenges with non-French names due to the system's limited adaptation to foreign pronunciations. Solutions require ongoing technical upgrades and manual intervention, which are time-consuming and not fully effective yet. This is a recognised issue within the field of French TTS and pronunciation technology, even if specific details about Le Monde's operational handling are not available in the search results.
Data-and-cloud-computing technologies are crucial for the implementation and maintenance of the Text-to-Speech (TTS) system that Le Monde utilizes. The system's artificial-intelligence component could be enhanced with better pronunciation guides and context-awareness, addressing the current challenges in accurately pronouncing foreign or non-standard names.
