The buses on my local bus route, the number 1 in Bath, run by First, had announcements of each stop introduced a few months ago. This ought to be very useful, but for some reason the automated voice cannot pronounce places correctly, and even gets commonly used words wrong, e.g. Cemetery is pronounced with the emphasis on the second e!
Some names which ought to present no problem with pronunciation are almost unintelligible - it took me ages to work out what road was being announced before I worked out it was Avon (which sounds like it starts with U).
However, this all pales into insignificance today, as the announcements now seem to be in a foreign language! Some unintelligible string of words comes out, and then the road name in English (except for my local one which had a foreign word in it, again unintelligible!). After a while I thought (and some others on the bus also thought) that it might be Welsh (as it sounds like the ramble of words starts with 'safle' which I believe is the Welsh for 'stop', but the first word said actually sounds more like Staffle. We tried asking the bus drivers what is going on, but they didn't reply (they probably don't know anyway). All very odd.
At least it kept us all bemused. I look forward to my next journeys on them.
