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.
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.
I feel like at least with American english people have taken a lot of liberties in how they spell a name and then want it pronounced.
And I first read it as Ra-sh, but also could see it as Ray-sh.
What did you do to “teach it”?
I quikly gave up on correting those bots. Either you’re lucky and made a prompt that induced it to generate a decent answer. Or you’re not, and there’s no point in correcting it. In that case you’re better off doing whatever you were going to do without a LLM.
Short for Rachel?
Funny, the UK pronunciation for Rach is the way I would pronounce it, even though I’m Canadian and the Canadian way it gives I’ve never heard anyone say:
https://www.babynamespedia.com/pronounce/Rach
[ˈreɪ.tʃ’] RAY-ch
How do they differ? It’s literally just saying Rachel without the ‘el’.
You can listen on that site.
One is RAYch The other is RAHch
Maybe French Canadian? I’ve never heard that in English in my life
Did you try spelling it with phonetics?
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?
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.
How delightful. I mean, I knew there were reasons you don’t get the same results twice, but I’ve not dived into how all this works, as it seems to be complete bullshit. But it’s nice to hear that’s a feature.
