> you can't exactly coach a layperson on how to talk "the right way" to not trigger this vowel collapse
I've never noticed. At any rate, we should not coach people to adapt to technology in this way. It is Procrustean and anti-human and unnecessarily places a burden on people that belongs to the software and the developer.
For what it's worth, amateur radio operators already have specialized rules and techniques for speech, to improve clarity over a muffled noisy analog radio channel.
I've always suspected the optimal experience is a balance...we define some intermediate language that both the computers need to be programmed to understand and humans need to be trained to adopt.
The most obvious example is learning to type...I've had by far the most fun working with computers in a keyboard-centric environment, mostly because I'm good enough at pressing keys and the computer is good enough at understanding them.
That said, I agree with both you and GP: trying to train a layperson to talk differently based on the quirks of the codec used to encode their voice seems like a poor choice!
I've never noticed. At any rate, we should not coach people to adapt to technology in this way. It is Procrustean and anti-human and unnecessarily places a burden on people that belongs to the software and the developer.