OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly.

The models themselves are nondeterministic. Also, they tend to include a hidden (or sometimes visible) random seed that gets input into the models as well.

There is a reason why people keep asking “How do you spell it?” when being told a name in English. The counterpart is, “How do you pronounce it?”.

Even with “long a”, I still can’t tell how would you want to pronounce “Rach”. I can come up with 4 different pronounciations right now: “Ra-ah-ch”, “Ra-ah”, “Ra-sh”, “Ra-kh”.

Given that OP says this is a common English name (it’s not), I have to imagine that they’re referring to the common short form of Rachel. Pronounced as just the first syllable.

It’s literally the English version of an Old Testament name. It’s not Aiden or whatever the new hotness is, but it’s not uncommon.

Rachel is a very common given name. “Rach” is a fairly common nickname for it. “Rach” is not a common given name. (This matches what I said above.)

I just took a look at some baby name sites to try and find some statistics. I actually can’t find a single person named “Rach” because all the sites assume I want statistics for the long form, even when I’m on the page for “Rach” and they also have a page for “Rachel.” I’m interpreting this as being given the short form as your name is extremely rare.

I’m not claiming her given name was Rach. In fact, calling her that was rather disastrous (family only), but it was all my brain could come up with after “hon” was actually barely avoided. For my boss. In the middle of the newsroom.

I believe you didn’t intend to, but you did claim it, twice. Hence why the commenter I initially replied to (in which I guessed you meant the common _nick_name) was confused.

Then you replied to me saying “it’s literally from the bible [so it’s a common name]” implying that you disagreed with me about it being a nickname and you did really mean it as a given name.

Hopefully that explains the confusion.

To me, this simply is further evidence that LLMs aren’t ready for primetime, as though this were not already established.

What does any of this have to do with LLMs?

I mean I agree with the conclusion but the confused people here are… people. I think if you ask an LLM about the “common name Rach,” it’ll also tell you that you probably mean Rachel.

I know IPA (the linguistic term, not the beer … OK, I also know the beer, but that’s not important right now) … and, yeah, I tried that, but on a laptop without a numpad, it’s a bit of a slog.

What was maddening was the LLM got it right somewhere around 10% of the time after I corrected it. This was a voice conversation, so every time I corrected it, that should have been clear data. Aren’t these systems simply supposed to be pattern recognition? How is it outputting wildly different pronunciations (N>5) with constant inputs?

I’m pretty sure whatever voice system you’re using is just transcribing things to text and feeding it into an LLM, so it wouldn’t actually have that audio data. I’m not aware of any audio equivalent of LLMs existing.

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.