Japanese TTS Bug Turned 'Shōshō' Into Gibberish Due to Unicode Whitelist Gap

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A developer discovered that a text-to-speech system for a virtual inquiry desk was garbling Japanese phrases, turning '少々お待ちください' into something that sounded like 'shomo o-machi kudasai'. After ruling out the voice model, cache, and synthesis parameters, the root cause was traced to a preprocessing function that stripped characters not on an allowed list. The character '々', a common Japanese iteration mark, was excluded because Unicode classifies it under 'CJK Symbols and Punctuation' rather than 'CJK Unified Ideographs', which the whitelist covered. Further review revealed several other affected characters, including range symbols, colons used in time expressions, and rare kanji variants used in proper names. The fix required not just expanding the allowlist but converting ambiguous symbols like '〜' and ':' into Japanese-readable equivalents before synthesis.

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