This issue is going to be a hard one to address, so I expect it to stay open for a long time, probably indefinitely. But I thought I would raise it for fun and intellectual interest.

I have noticed that the token beneath the hat can interfere with my ability to pronounce the hat. For example, I have a harder time referring to the token bit when the hat is on the first letter (which I pronounce bat). This is likely due to interference, some analog of the Stroop effect. If we had a good understanding of where that interference occurs, we could penalize hats that would increase latency and/or error rate.

To actually address this, we would want to do some controlled experiments to convince ourselves that it is a real problem (not just something that Josh imagined from his phenomenological observations), characterize the problem more precisely, get access to talon's spoken form of the hats, and then do something about it. Unless there is a cognitive science graduate student who has an interest in voice coding, I suspect that step one will never happen.