Speech recognition for multi-lingual speakers is another pain point.
I live with a native French speaker, so my conversations naturally include a lot of French proper names, as well sometimes switching languages mid conversation or even mid sentence.
Lots of recognition engines can handle English and French, but treat them as mutually exclusive. It frustrates me to no end when I know that Siri can recognize a French proper name just fine if I switch it modally into French, but will botch it horribly in English.
As a multi-lingual speaker I've even had problems with speech synthesis. For instance, Google Maps insists on narrating driving directions in the system language, which is set to English; this makes the narrated local non-English place names incomprehensible. If I succumb and change the system language I can understand the narrated place names, but in return I have to put up with the poor speech synthesis of non-English languages.
I was just in France last week suffering through the same problem. I’m American, so I want to keep my system set to English both due to familiarity of the interface and because I want data in familiar units (miles, degrees Fahrenheit), but it kills me when every street and place name is absolutely butchered.
An interesting observation I made last week was that the poor synthesis of French street names in English mode was worse than American-mispronouncing-French level. I wonder if that exposes some level of mismatch between how the synthesis engine models language and how humans do.
In the case of French names it probably depends on if you have any exposure to French pronunciation rules at all. I have a pretty crappy level of high school French but I can usually manage not to butcher pronunciation. I was with a friend in Montreal though and she had absolutely no idea how to pronounce many things.
I live with a native French speaker, so my conversations naturally include a lot of French proper names, as well sometimes switching languages mid conversation or even mid sentence.
Lots of recognition engines can handle English and French, but treat them as mutually exclusive. It frustrates me to no end when I know that Siri can recognize a French proper name just fine if I switch it modally into French, but will botch it horribly in English.