Most or all voices pronouncing Doctor abbreviation as code in 17 beta

By Hand2Mouth, 14 July, 2023

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Apple Beta Releases

Installed the 17 public beta on an iPad Pro. Whether VoiceOver is reading text in a book or reading back a sentence I’ve typed, every voice I’ve tried so far including the Nuance voices and US Siri has read the abbreviation for Dr. as “Drive e pause equals 324" instead of Doctor. I made an entry for it in the pronunciation dictionary, but that didn’t work. The funny thing is, this only happens when reading continuously or by line; if I change the rotor to go word by word, the voices read out “Doctor" just fine.

I’m reporting the bug for what it’s worth, but was curious if it was happening to anyone else.

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Comments

By Brooke on Friday, July 14, 2023 - 18:13

I'm running the most recent update to iOS 16, and the same thing is happening. It's been this way for months.

By Hand2Mouth on Friday, July 14, 2023 - 19:10

And of course both books I’ve started reading heavily involve doctors in some way, which is how I even noticed. Another odd thing—a friend of mine tried it with Speak Screen and the same voices, and they pronounced it just fine. Huh. I did report it, but who knows.

By KE8UPE on Saturday, July 15, 2023 - 03:22

Hi,
I’d been noticing this problem with the Zoe voice under iOS 17 but now that I’ve just switched back to Eloquence, I’m not seeing the issue.
Another issue I’ve come across is the fact that if using braille screen input to type a comment on this site, voiceover speaks what your typing but nothing actually gets entered.
The final observation, I'll make, at least, for now, is the fact that when navigating by word, stuff gets added. As a result, it's easiest to go to the end of the text, delete everything, and just start over again.
I just did that, and eloquence seemed to behave OK. This issue seems extremely common with the vocalizer voices though.

By Hand2Mouth on Saturday, July 15, 2023 - 10:07

I hadn’t tried Eloquence because I can’t hear those voices very well, but I’ve been using Alex for a bit and he seems to still be okay. It’s mainly the Nuance voices and Siri translating the word to code, then. Which is a lot. Luckily Alex is easy on the ears!