Three Tries to Get Kannada TTS Right on a Smart Speaker. Here's What I Learned.

I asked an AI agent to announce the morning schedule in Kannada on a Google Home speaker. Three iterations later, I finally had something that didn't sound like a robot reading a textbook. Here's exactly what went wrong — and why the fix was about linguistics, not technology. The Setup My home AI agent (running on a Raspberry Pi) does morning briefings via Google Home speakers. It checks the calendar, fetches weather, and reads out the day's schedule. Simple enough. I wanted to switch from generic English announcements to something more natural — Kannada-English code-mix, the way our family actually talks. I'm using Sarvam.AI's Bulbul v3 TTS, which supports kn-IN voice natively. Iteration 1: Latin Transliteration (The Obvious Mistake) My first attempt passed the Kannada words as Latin transliteration: text = "Good morning! Ee hage ninna schedule: Swimming at 10:45. Enjoy!" # Passed to Sarvam TTS with voice="kn-IN" Result: it sounded like a Hindi speaker reading a transliteration. The m