Yeah, these double consonants do indeed sometimes sound strange, especially “ññ”. Aditi pronounces them as two syllables. So far we haven’t found a way to change this.
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As Anagarika Sabbamitta mentions, it’s difficult. It’s difficult because correcting one word often breaks others, so it ends up being a game of whack-a-mole. Generally speaking, we opt for non-ambiguity (e.g., single vs. doubled consonant). Regarding the ñ, we even had to use an unsupported phoneme ɲ, which is not Hindi and is therefore very very risky since it may or not be supported in the future by Amazon. 
But here is some of what we have tried:
- ɾu: pəɲ ɲu: current phonemes
- ɾu: pəɲɲu: omit syllabic break (which may cause problems elsewhere)
- ɾu: pən nu: use plain n phoneme (which loses diacritic meaning)
The challenge is to define a Pali “Aditi accent” where what is spoken is intelligible, even though it may differ from human speakers. It’s like have Australian, English and American accents, each of which has a distinct sound but all of which are individually intelligible for semantics.
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Thanks again for your efforts, Karl! Unfortunately, none of these is really more satisfying than what we have already, so I would think it is safer to leave things as they are.
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ñ sound pronounced as in señor (spanish version)
Here it sounds as in canyon, it is close, but not the exact sound.
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Yes, the problem is that these voices all come with their own set of phonemes, and what we can do is mostly just within this set of phonemes. Aditi is originally a Hindi language, not Pali. These two languages have many phonemes in common, but not all.
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We would benefit a lot from a Pali-dedicated TTS voice !
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Yes, if something better than Aditi would become available that would be great indeed! But meanwhile I feel the work Karl has done for Aditi is already fantastic!!
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Voice supports human narrators as well. Bhante Sujato records his own translations as well as root texts. Aditi’s coverage is more extensive, but one can choose the following preference, which will play back Bhante’s recordings segmented by MichaelH if they are available:
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(reposted poll) 
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Hahaha!!! Too funny, all three of them!
The first one has a laundry peg on her nose, the second… I don’t know, but doesn’t sound really comfortable, just as the third. Maybe I’d opt for the third—she reminds me of a sheep. 
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I added a poll. Time to vote for your 
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It’s “other”, right?
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Hmm. There are four choices. The first is the quirky original. The third is the open one pẽ
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It’s not easy to see which of the examples corresponds to which option in the poll.
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I’m working now on the pesky, spitting pe. This one is tricky because it seems to be an actual AWS Polly bug–the same IPA generates different sounds. From a search for pe\b (the backslash b denotes a word end), we have two examples. The first is correct. The second is not:
- sangha…pe…
- mahābhogo…pe…
Both use exactly the same IPA for pe: pe 
Because of this, I thought to change the IPA for pe slightly.
What shall we choose?
- (original) pe
- Nasal pẽ
- Open pɛ̃
- Other pɛ
- Doubled dipthong pee
0 voters
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So it seems I’ve voted for the sheep now, but I can live with the laundry peg just as well! 
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Oh! I found another way!
See doubled diphthong
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Much better!!!
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Looks like we both like it. What is funny is that we have violated Pali pronunciation by making it a long “e”. 
Well, I’ll implement that for now unless others outvote our choice. Thank you. 
I hope it doesn’t pees-off anybody…
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“e” is always long in Pali—very few exceptions!
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