Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet
speak-ipa.bearbin.net
Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet
#2Doesn't seem to work in Safari, probably because the audio is a wav.
Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet
#3The IPA itself isn't really sufficient to encode the sound of a word: you also need to know what language is being spoken; there is a little book you can get of vowel charts for all of the major languages in the world that tries to document the exact vocal position of each symbol. The issue is that there's a continuum of sound that can be generated by the human vocal system, and while humans don't want to differentiate between subtle variations while trying to talk to each other (and so you wouldn't expect two words with massively different meanings based on some extremely subtle and difficult to hear difference), they can notice the difference (which is part of what causes people to have "accents" based on their native languages: because they are pronouncing vowels in some slightly different part of their mouth). IPA only represents the major possibilities, not the specific variants (though there are extended and increasingly complex symbols to try to provide some more accuracy, it is again a continuum and not something you can represent with a small and finite set of symbols per vowel: you'd have to start putting a couple numbers down to represent the sound ;P).
Sadly, I'm having a very difficult time finding a good reference for this online. I know all of this because I spent years studying graduate Linguistics at UCSB while I was trying to get a PhD in Computer Science, and I carried around that little book of per-language vowel charts for a long time ;P.
http://www.antimoon.com/how/english-vowel-chart.htm
> For example, the average British /æ/ is slightly more open (more like /a/) than the average American /æ/.
That said, I typed all of that under an expectation that it was going to work really well, but in practice this website sounds a lot like Dr. Sbaitso, and so the nuance of pronunciation is totally lost anyway ;P.
Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet
#4Doesn't seem to work in Safari, probably because the audio is a wav.
If you mean you get prompted to download speaky.cgi, that happens in Firefox/Windows too.
Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet
#5The IPA itself isn't really sufficient to encode the sound of a word: you also need to know what language is being spoken; there is a little book you can get of vowel charts for all of the major languages in the world that tries to document the exact vocal position of each symbol. The issue is that there's a continuum of sound that can be generated by the human vocal system, and while humans don't want to differentia…
Thanks for taking the time to critique this - it's only something I put together in a few hours for fun. I'm sure somebody with more skill than me would be able to make something like this for multiple languages / accents.
Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet
#6Didn't know about IPA before seeing this, thanks for sharing.
Saying "hacker news" in IPA using your tool: https://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/speak.cgi?speak=%27h%C3%A6k%C9...
Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet
#7The IPA itself isn't really sufficient to encode the sound of a word: you also need to know what language is being spoken; there is a little book you can get of vowel charts for all of the major languages in the world that tries to document the exact vocal position of each symbol. The issue is that there's a continuum of sound that can be generated by the human vocal system, and while humans don't want to differentia…
Thanks for taking the time to critique this - it's only something I put together in a few hours for fun. I'm sure somebody with more skill than me would be able to make something like this for multiple languages / accents.
This could actually be quite useful for generating stimuli for artificial language learning experiments (used in psychology and linguistics) where you don't want to model longer-distance effects among speech sounds (avoiding correlated queues), and need a 1:1 correspondence between symbols and sounds. Do you have a command line version?
One other thought: you could compare the output with espeak (http://espeak.sourceforge.net/) or use espeak to generate IPA transcriptions for various languages.
Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet
#8It'd be very, very useful if you could F/OSS this, so that we could build something to help illustrate hard-to-pronounce Wikipedia articles, which currently have to be manually pronounced. There are thousands of these needed!
Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet
#9The IPA itself isn't really sufficient to encode the sound of a word: you also need to know what language is being spoken; there is a little book you can get of vowel charts for all of the major languages in the world that tries to document the exact vocal position of each symbol. The issue is that there's a continuum of sound that can be generated by the human vocal system, and while humans don't want to differentia…
>> "there is a little book you can get of vowel charts for all of the major languages in the world that tries to document the exact vocal position of each symbol."
What is the name of the book? Do you have a link to it on Amazon or the ISBN for the version you're recommending?
Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet
#10Some time ago I've found out that the macOS say command does support IPA. However not all word seem to work.