Since this article mentions driving navigation:
My absolute dream feature for that would be a navigation text to speech voice which can be set to English, but pronounces location names in other languages correctly and not like an English person trying to pronounce an odd English word.
As someone who has their phone set to English but usually drives in Germany, sometimes France, Italy or Switzerland it’s funny at first to hear the strange attempts to pronounce street names but it really does get old.
Since it appears like none of the big maps apps seem to be interested in this feature I’ve sometimes wondered if it could be done by contributing to something like organic maps. I’ve found some academic projects about doing code-switching tts like that, but nothing built into an actual product.
If anyone has any thoughts on that it would be interesting to hear.
It's not quite the same, but in Google Maps you can switch the language of the app itself. I use this to get navigation not butchering street names into unrecognisability while the rest of my phone is English. It does do the whole navigation in that language though, so you do need to be able to understand it to a reasonable degree, and it won't switch based on places (so it'll then mess up when I'm somewhere with English names.)
This would already be an improvement for me, since I am a native German speaker who usually prefers device language be set to English. I wasn't aware it was possible to set language on a per-app basis on iOS, thank you!
Doesn't work for Apple Maps unfortunately, which has a nice voice but is dependent on the Siri voice setting, which I prefer to be in English.
Not all languages are created equal though. When driving in the UK, I use the American English voice which gives more precise directions, like street names. The British English voice doesn't (just "turn left, turn right").
FWIW cycle.travel on iOS (my app!) does this for cycling directions. It's not that difficult - there's a built-in "guess the language" API in iOS, and doing a quick country polygon lookup adds a bit more context. (Not on Android yet - I've only just released the first version of the Android app and haven't had a chance to add that in yet.)
Oh that’s very interesting!
Do you use the built-in iOS speech synthesis API as well?
Don’t the voices for different languages sound quite different so it’s a more jarring transition when a location is being spoken? Or is it not that noticeable?
It's a little jarring at first and, most annoyingly, iOS inserts a pause during the transition which appears to be unremovable. But on balance I greatly prefer it to "Turn left onto Playce dee lar Ree-pub-lee-queue".
Since it appears like none of the big maps apps seem to be interested in this feature I’ve sometimes wondered if it could be done by contributing to something like organic maps. I’ve found some academic projects about doing code-switching tts like that, but nothing built into an actual product. If anyone has any thoughts on that it would be interesting to hear.