English words that TTS often gets wrong

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English is a difficult language to synthesize speech for, as it is only something like 70 or 80% phonetic. What that means is that there are so many exceptions that Gen1 TTS software (2001 to 2016) cannot get right. With that said, I feel like with improvements in Soft-AI, I feel like TTS should be able to pronounce some of these in the next 2 to 3 years:

Words that TTS Gen1 also pronounces incorrectly

  • 'winds' like in 'winds up in court'
  • 'resume' like in 'please find my resume attached' (résumé is often better)
  • 'putting' like in 'the supporters were putting up signs for' (puting doesn't work, it sounds putrid)
  • 'lives' like in 'where my favorite pop star lives' fails to be pronounced like "livs"


However, now with GenAU and natural speech synthesis, modern TTS is getting better at all of these pronunciations by contacts. However, even modern, it still seems to have issues, like:

  • 'the go to something' like in 'he is the go to person' example