Getting the Words Right

Nothing breaks the spell of a good narration faster than a mispronounced word. You can be fully absorbed in an article and then the narrator confidently butchers a name you know — and suddenly you're not listening to a story anymore, you're listening to a computer. My personal breaking point was hearing about the Boston "KELL-ticks." As a basketball fan based in Massachusetts, that wasn't going to work.

Text-to-speech engines have gotten very good, but they still stumble on certain things: surnames, acronyms, team names, etc. So Earmail keeps its own pronunciation dictionary that sits in front of the narration — a growing list of words we've taught it to say correctly. It also makes judgment calls about acronyms: some want to be read as words, some want to be spelled out letter by letter, and getting that wrong is just as distracting as a bad pronunciation.

The part that's most important is that all Earmail users are part of the process. Every episode page has a way to report a mispronunciation — tell us the word and how it should sound, and we add it to the dictionary. The fix is permanent and it applies to everyone: you tell us once, and Earmail never says it wrong again, in any episode, for any listener.

It's a small thing, but small things add up and are what make Earmail a better listening experience. If something in your episodes doesn't sound right, send it my way — I genuinely enjoy these reports, and they make the whole service better, one word at a time.

Jeff