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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

"(name) (Roman numeral)" is a much more commong occurence than "(name) (Single letter spelled out)".

So to answer your question, this one. This universe.

And no, nobody "programmed this". I don't know how anyone of decent technical competence can think that. The workaround has likely been hardcoded in some way, if anything. How can you possibly think that someone at google decided it would be funny to program, on purpose, a wrong pronunciation of Malcolm X, and even more so SOMEHOW NOT GET CAUGHT.

By the way, there are an incredibly large amount of streets in the US alone, so no it would not be surprising. Here in Europe we have kings going up into the twenties of their name, and those ML models have to pronounce those too.

I just... I just fucking can't, with comments like yours, anymore.

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Is it sometimes a challenge to navigate in areas where streets like e.g. "Louis XXII" and "Louis XXIII" are near each other?

I wouldn't know, no such king exists. Also, i don't have a car.

I would put money on the US having several streets named after European monarchs though. Maybe ask your GPS these questions instead.

> "(name) (Roman numeral)" is a much more commong occurence than "(name) (Single letter spelled out)"

> So to answer your question, this one. This universe.

But this is true in this universe only in some countries and places. There are many countries and places where an initial would follow the name and it is the legal name.

This is precisely the problem with the data/algorithm as well as your argument. They’re not well formed for different contexts and need to have more context sensitivity.

Cultural sensitivity, you mean. If it mispronounced a random non-icon's name everyone would chuckle and forget about it.

Pattern matchers don't understand culture, so this is gonna be a hard-coded workaround or intentional distortion of dataset to try and achieve the hard-coded workaround.

The comment i was replying to straight up claimed this was done with intent.

I agree with you, the algorithm needs to have more context sensitivity as you say. But nobody at google is getting their rocks off making the AI mispronounce things on purpose.

Especially since, as anyone who used Google Maps in multilingual areas will attest, the algorithm is awful at dealing with context in general. It mispronounces tons of things. In Belgium it will switch between dutch and french names for streets randomly.

Google Maps canonicalizes my address in Dutch, so whenever i input it on a website i have to deal with it "helpfully" "correcting" it to dutch. Which makes things difficult when I have to deal with French speakers...

Google Maps has a lot of problems that are causing real harm to non-us cultures, which would likely get fixed with diversity. But i would never claim these things are done on purpose.

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