Designing speech apps for Spanish
Sondra Ahlen is a Silicon Valley consultant who co-authored an interesting paper in the July/August Speech Technology magazine called "
¿Bueno? Are You listening to Your Spanish Speakers". She notes how different an application can be when translated into Spanish. Some interesting observations:
- Many US Spanish speakers pronounce zip codes like numbers: 10001 as "diez mil uno" ('ten thousand one')
- Street names are usually spoken in English, but with a heavy Spanish accent: "Main" might be pronounced like "mine".
- Lots of variation across use of English vs. Spanish in addresses. For example, sometimes people say "La Calle Main Norte" or "Norte Main Calle" or just "North Main Street".
We need to think about all these possibilities when we write the sample grammars and controls for the Spanish version of MSS.
