How I helped GOOGLE help YOU pronounce words correctly | 🔥Google Pronto Pronunciation 🔥

Hey, it's Hadar and this is the Accent's Way.

Today, I want to tell you about a new tool

Google has recently launched that is going to help you understand

how to pronounce words clearly and that I had the privilege to help develop it.

Now I may not be objective

but I really think it is one of the best tools out there if you're looking to understand

the pronunciation of a word in a fast and simple way

and of course you don't have the 3 to 15 minutes to watch one of my videos.

Now if you know me by now you know that my mission in life is

my mission in life is to simplify English pronunciation

and make it accessible for non-native speakers.

Being one myself I know how confusing it can be trying to

I know how confusing it can be trying to understand the right pronunciation

simply by looking at the spelling

and If you don't have previous knowledge of IPA or the like then when you're searching for a word in the dictionary or Wikipedia

then what you see it is not very helpful because you don't know how to read it.

Now this is exactly why for the past 10 years I've been writing English phonetically.

That means I write it the way it sounds. I've been doing it in my videos

and with my students and

while it completely, completely messed up my spelling capabilities.

Really. I've forgotten how to spell. It tremendously helped my students,

which is the important thing.

So this is why when the Google dictionary team

rang me up and asked me if I want to help them

create a new spelling system for their users who are looking for the

pronunciation of words

and by users I mean the millions of us who use the Google search bar

of course I said

Google who?

oh ... no, I'm sorry I have to.... I have to wash my hair

Okay, bye-bye.

Of course

I said: "hell, yeah"!

I teamed up with Google's developers, linguists and product managers

and together we created a new way to spell words.

So you're probably really eager to try it out.

So I'm gonna tell you how you can access it

All you need to do is use your phone because you can't use it on your computer

just yet, just on mobile

and go to Google Chrome and type in 'how to pronounce' blank

or 'how to say' and then you

type in the word that you're looking for and then a small box will appear with the word

the new pronunciation of the word and notice that you'll see in bold the primary stress

that is the one syllable that sticks out the most, that is longer louder and higher in pitch.

You'll also have a small illustration of a person pronouncing the word.

Will be able to play it in regular speed and in half the speed to get a clear idea of the pronunciation

and you'll be able to choose between American English,

British English and Indian English if you live in India

How cool is that?

Now If you're wondering why we decided on one representation

over another then I'd like to share with you a little bit more about the process

as I think you might find it interesting

the first question we had to ask ourselves is how to make this phonetic spelling

as intelligible and simple for all speakers?

Because obviously with the English alphabet triggers

for speakers who use the same spelling system like Spanish and Italian

and German and French is not going to be the same as it is for speakers who use a different spelling system

like Arabic and Chinese and japanese and Swahili.

So the representation needed to be as broad as possible

so it would resonate with almost all speakers.

We also had to take into consideration some limitations

For example the English alphabet.

How do you represent over 15 vowels with only 5 vowel letters?

A, O, U, I and E.

We also had to take into consideration

time constraints and code limitations

and also, the intuition of native speakers versus non-native speakers

because obviously native speakers are going to be using this tool as well.

So ultimately every time we had to make a tough decision

what led us was the idea that

clarity and simplicity are more important than accuracy.

Now some of the sounds were really easy to represent

mostly consonants.

For example the F, right? So most speakers know that

the letter F represents the F-sound

and it was easy to decide that whenever there is F in the word

we will use the letter F

and it doesn't matter if in the original word there is an F, a PH or a GH.

It would always show up with a letter F.

It was a little more challenging with vowel sounds,

especially similar vowels that are pronounced the same by non-native speakers,

for example, the tense 'e' and the relaxed 'i'

as in 'sheep' versus 'ship'.

So here I guess it was a little easier because we decided to go with two vowel letters

the EE for the tense, 'e' as in 'sweet', 'we' and 'please'

and 'I' for the relaxed E as in 'sit', 'kid' and 'list'.

First because it's pretty consistent with a spelling,

pretty consistent because there are a lot of exceptions of course.

But also the two vowel letters indicate that it's somewhat of a longer sound

which it is, okay.

So intuitively, it feels like you need to hold it out a bit longer

and that helps with getting the right pronunciation.

But it wasn't as easy with the 'food' and 'foot' vowel pair.

Here we have the tense U as in 'room', 'cool' and 'two'

and the relaxed U as in 'cook', 'look' and 'book'.

So the double O appears both in the tense U

'room', 'cool' and the relaxed U 'cook', 'look'.

So whatever we do

It's not going to be super intuitive

We ended up deciding

that the two vowel letters will represent the tense U as it is a longer vowel

again indicating the length

and the U is going to represent the relaxed U.

I guess the most challenging thing was to decide how to represent the schwa.

The schwa is a very neutral vowel sound and it's probably the most common vowel sound in English

and it sounds something like this uh, uh.

And if you don't know anything about it, definitely go check out my schwa lesson.

Now the schwa is represented with any of the 5 vowel letters.

It can be A, O, U, I or E or any combination of the five

and usually non-native speakers pronounce the pure vowel

that is associated with a vowel letter. Okay,

so, for example, if there is an A as in 'about'

it will be pronounced as 'About', 'Ah' .

If there is an O as in 'computer', it will be pronounced as O, 'cOmputer'.

So on and so forth.

So we ended up deciding that the schwa is going to be represented with UH

which is sort of the sound that you write when you want to indicate a sigh, ur

Or when someone is trying to think of what they have to say

uh ....

right, it's this 'uh' small sigh which is practically the schwa

uh, uh

And

to help simplify it with the schwa appears before syllabic consonants

syllabic consonants are consonants that kind of take over the vowel and eat it up

and these are the L, M, N and R.

So when syllabic consonants appear before in R

we decided to take out the vowel completely

thinking that if someone tries to pronounce the word as it's written,

the result is going to be the accurate pronunciation.

without any additional vowel sounds.

Okay. That's it.

What I want you to do now is go check it out for yourself.

Go and search for the most confusing words that you know,

and then come back here and share with me your experience

Tell me if it was helpful,

if it was confusing, if some parts were confusing,

if a certain word have any mistakes.

Tell me, first, because I really want to know.

And, second, because I really think your feedback can help us improve this in the future.

Okay, that's it. Thank you so much for watching.

If you like this video and you want to learn more go to my website

the accentsway.com

and subscribe to my email newsletter

and get a new video lesson to your inbox every single week.

Have a wonderful week, and I will see you next week in the next video. Bye