Werkstatt
Do you know how a German AI voice pronounces «cloud»?
Do you know how a German AI voice pronounces the word «cloud»? «Kluht.»
And «pipeline» becomes «Piepeliene». The voice reads German by German rules — including every English word that has long been part of our business language.
Funny, as long as nobody hears it. But AI now speaks for companies: phone announcements, texts read aloud, voice bots on the customer line. Then its vocabulary is your business card — product names, place names, the names of your customers.
The fix is not a better model but a dictionary that somebody maintains. We keep more than 2,400 English loanwords with their correct pronunciation, taken from an open dictionary.
That is the AI-run back office in miniature: it is not the software that makes the difference, but that somebody operates it.
Which word would your phone announcement get wrong?
How the dictionary came about
The words come from the German Wiktionary: every entry listed there as a loan from English, with its phonetic transcription. Loanwords from Latin or French — «Adresse», for example — are deliberately left out. The voice pronounces those correctly by itself, and converting the transcription would make them worse rather than better.
Three rules for a dictionary
- An entry applies to exactly that word. Otherwise the English «end» bends the German «Ende» (end) into «Ente» (duck), and «tag» spoils «Tage» (days). The plural in -s belongs to it — «Backups» and «Reviews» should be right.
- Words spelled the same stay out. «Daten» and «Rappen» exist in both languages. Such entries sit on a drop list.
- Measure first, then install. Before every new version, every word from all previous posts is read with the old and the new dictionary. German words must not change.
What this means for your back office
As soon as a machine speaks or writes for your company, its vocabulary becomes your business card: product names, place names, the names of your customers. This is not a one-off setup but upkeep — exactly the kind of work that gets left undone in daily business. How we take it over as an operation: Your back office, run by AI.