Russian TTS

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Level 1

4 points

Russian TTS

Russian TTS has a very annoying bug: the sequence of Cyrillic characters "на " (i.e. "н", "а" and space) pronounced something like “date nom” plus something else that cannot be expressed in any existing alphabet except IPA :-). Apple support suggested me to upgrade my devices (iPhone and iPad) to the latest 15.0.2 which I did. It didn't help.

The above sequence met in Russian as frequently as English "on " (i.e. "o", "n" and space) - so you can imagine how annoying this bug is.

Support team created two cases about this: but I cannot trace it.

I saw similar question by user genixg.

[Personal Information Edited by Moderator]

iPad, iPadOS 15

Posted on Oct 22, 2021 5:14 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

dmalinovsky

Level 1

18 points

Nov 3, 2021 6:28 AM in response to voroz

I found a workaround. If you go to the “Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content > Pronunciations” and add a custom replacement from Cyrillic letters “на” to Latin “na” in all languages, this bug no longer happens.

See the screenshot.

The important bit is to choose All Languages. If you choose Russian only, it doesn’t work.

Hope it helps you, because I still have iOS 14 version, not 15.

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Answer 2

Nov 3, 2021 8:41 AM in response to voroz

I also had to replace «это» with “eto”, TTS is adding “datenum” after this word as well.

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Answer 3

Nov 3, 2021 11:17 AM in response to voroz

On iOS you can use Google app with Read Aloud feature. The latest version is crashing for me, though, but maybe you’ll have more luck. It only allows listening to the web pages only, unlike builtin TTS.

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Answer 4

Nov 3, 2021 9:02 AM in response to voroz

I found out that this bug happens with any word ending with «-на», for example, «оснащена». I replaced «она» with “ona”, since it’s a pretty common word. As for the other occurrences, we’ll have to wait for a proper fix.

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Answer 5

voroz Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 3, 2021 10:17 AM in response to dmalinovsky

Right. But "меня " for example works OK.

So they seriously broke something, I am sure we will see many other similar problems... "Datenum" or such sounds to me like TTS tries to read HTML "&num", "&nbsp" or so. Could it be the key?

Do you know, is there a way to downgrade things? Not a whole application but something like plugins(?), engines(?) (not sure how to correctly call them) that used by applications? Let's say TTS engine.

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