this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly. (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 week ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Seriously, 15 times is my limit on correcting an LLM.

The name in question? Rach. Google absolutely cannot pronounce it in any other way than assuming I was referring to Louise Fletcher in the diminutive.

Specifying "long a" did nothing, and now I'm past livid. If you can't handle a common English name, why would I trust you with anything else?

This is my breaking point with LLMs. They're fucking idiotic and can't learn how to pronounce English words auf Englisch.

I hope the VCs also die in a fire.

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[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The equivalent is NLP (natural language processing), which was already a huge research area in the '90s. In fact, had I not been a fucking idiot and caught the journalism bug, with my studies in CS and linguistics, I'd likely be doing quite well.

This said, that was about voice input being converted to text -- e.g., Dragon Naturally Speaking -- but apparently little progress has been made going in the other direction. NotebookLM had other weird glitches where standard English words get weird vowels some 5% of the time.