Correcting a pronunciation

The local voice works a word out from its spelling when nobody has written the pronunciation down for it. Most of the time that is right. Sometimes it is not — Elite has four hundred billion system names, Frontier keep adding to them, and the community argues about half the ones that already exist.

When you hear one you disagree with, you can fix it yourself. It takes a text file and no restart.

The file

Make a file called pronunciations.json in the data folder beside d47.exe. The Diagnostics page says exactly where that is, and whether d47 has found one yet.

{
  "Shinrarta Dezhra": "shin rar tah dezh rah",
  "Deciat": "dessy at",
  "Dezhra": "ipa:ˈdɛʒɹə"
}

Save it. Say the word again. That is the whole loop — d47 re-reads the file whenever it changes, so you never have to leave the game.

Delete the file and everything goes back to how it shipped.

The two ways to write an entry

Respell it. Write the word the way it sounds, in ordinary letters, and d47 says it the way it would say those letters. "Deciat": "dessy at". This is the one to reach for first — it needs nothing but your ear.

Capitals are for you, not for d47: it reads DEZH and dezh the same way. If you want the emphasis in a particular place, use the other form.

Write the sounds exactly. Put ipa: in front and the rest is taken as IPA, symbol for symbol, including where the stress mark ˈ goes. "Dezhra": "ipa:ˈdɛʒɹə". This is exact control and it is expert-hostile; it is here for the stubborn ones.

What the rules are

  • Whole words only. An entry for male will never reach inside female, and one for observe will never reach inside observed. A key can be several words — Shinrarta Dezhra is one name — and the longest matching entry wins.
  • Capitals do not matter in the word being corrected. DEZHRA, Dezhra and dezhra are the same entry.
  • It beats everything. Your entry outranks the shipped dictionary and the letter-to-sound rules both. Nothing overrides it.
  • A broken entry is ignored, not fatal. An empty pronunciation, or IPA containing a symbol the voice has no sound for, is skipped: that word is said the way it would have been anyway, and the log names the entry once so you can go and fix it. The rest of your file still works.
  • Comments and a trailing comma are allowed, because this is a file a person types into.

What it does not cover

This is the local voice only. ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Cartesia and Edge each work out their own pronunciations inside their own service, where d47 cannot reach — so an entry here does nothing when one of those is speaking. That is not a bug to report.

It is also per installation, not per Commander. How a word sounds is a fact about the voice, not about who is flying, so every Commander on this machine gets the same corrections.