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 three to 15 minutes to watch one of my videos. Now, if you know me by now, you know that 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 understand the right pronunciation of a word 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 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 well, 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 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 going to 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. You'll be able to play it in regular speed and in half the speed. Take 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, 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 five 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 the 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 e, 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 sui, we and please, and I for the relaxed E as in sit, kid, and list first, because it's pretty consistent with the 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 to in the relaxed U as in cook look, buck. So the double o appears both in the tense u room cool and the relaxed, uh, 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. 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 five vowel letters. It can be an 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. 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 u, h, which is sort of the sound that you write when you want to indicate a sigh or when someone is trying to think of what they have to say. Right? It's this, uh, small sigh, which is practically the schwa, uh, uh. And to help simplify it, when 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 an 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 you, a certain word had 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, theaccentsway.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.