A Voicebot Just Left Me Speechless
It’s not that hard to say my name, Saahil Desai. Saahil: rhymes with sawmill, or at least that gets you 90 percent there. Desai: like decide with the last bit chopped off. That’s really it.
More often than not, however, my name gets butchered into a menagerie of gaffes and blunders. The most common one, Sa-heel, is at least an honest attempt—unlike its mutant twin, a monosyllabic mess that comes out sounding like seal. Others defy all possible logic. Once, a college classmate read my name, paused, and then confidently said, “Hi, Seattle.”
But the mispronunciations that bug me the most aren’t uttered by any human. They come. It fares better than the AI service I use to transcribe interviews, which has identified me by a string of names that seem stripped from a failed British boy band (Nigel, Sal, Michael, Daniel, Scott Hill). Silicon Valley aspires for its products to be world-changing, but evidently that also means name-changing
