The contacts app has fields for Phonetic and Pronunciation. My app adds phonetic data to the phonetic field to help Siri better understand contacts stored in Greek, Cyrillic, or Georgian. However, using the phonetic field causes the sorting order of contacts to be messed up. For example, Greek B (beta) is represented as a phonetic sound of V, resulting in a completely incorrect sorting order.
The pronunciation field doesn’t seem to affect the sorting order, but I’m not sure what it does or should do.
My questions are:
- Do we understand the difference between phonetic and pronunciation, and how Siri actively uses them?
- If the phonetic field is the correct one to use, how can we raise a feature request with Apple to add an option to sort contacts based on phonetic fields or not?
Here’s a test you can try:
Create a new contact with the following details:
- First name: test
- Last name: test
- Phonetic first name: Billy
- Phonetic last name: Idol
Ask Siri to show the contact Billy Idol. It will return the “test test” contact.
Switch from the phonetic to the pronunciation fields. Now, Siri won’t find Billy Idol.
Our engineering teams need to investigate this issue, as resolution may involve changes to Apple's software. Please file a bug report, include a small Xcode project and some directions that can be used to reproduce the problem, and post the Feedback number here once you do. If you post the Feedback number here I'll check the status next time I do a sweep of forums posts where I've suggested bug reports.
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