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Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet

speak-ipa.bearbin.net

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Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet

#13

Post by compay »

I've been hoping to see something like this for quite some time. Kudos for a really cool project and for making it available for people to play with.

At least for Spanish, it can pronounce some words fairly well. I wrote a Spanish orthography-to-IPA converter a few years back. It's up on Heroku until folks crash it if you want to get some Spanish words transcribed to IPA.

http://spanish-demo.herokuapp.com/

I used it to generate a few random words. Some of the sounds were off - for example ɾ (the "r" in "estar"). But many words were pronounced clearly enough to be understood.

Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet

#15

Post by XaspR8d »

It's amazing for how useful IPA is (at least at providing an reasonable fidelity intermediate form between other, more-accurate representations) how few FOSS projects I've seen use it.

Really what I'm saying is I'd like to see someone build an automated pun-discovery tool.

Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet

#16

Post by aliceyhg »

This is the first time I'm hearing about IPA. I wanted to test out how IPA works so I searched for chinese to IPA converter and came across this site: http://easypronunciation.com/en/chinese-pinyin-phonetic-tran...

I put in a few chinese sentences, got the IPA, then pasted into your app and listened to the sentence in IPA. Although it wasn't very accurate, its one of the coolest things I learned this year. Thank you very much for sharing.

I think a really cool next step is to add the ability to type things in and get the IPA and pronunciation.

Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet

#18

Post by didymospl »

saurik wrote: post #3

The 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…

It may not be sufficient but it is surely very useful when you have no idea how to pronounce the word. Besides, I think it works quite well for English. When I started learning it I had to rely on the IPA transcriptions every time I looked up new words in a dictionary. Even now, when online dictionaries have nice recordings of the vocabulary spoken by native speakers, I still use it for proper nouns(names etc.) that are not included in dictionaries when I can't find the recorded pronunciation e.g. on Youtube.

Re: Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet

#19

Post by nereye »

saurik wrote: post #3

The 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…

For a comprehensive site proposing a more accurate representation than IPA, named canIPA, please see http://venus.unive.it/canipa/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:start.
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