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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

#21

Post by pluma »

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…

One minor nit: it's important to distinguish between phonemic and phonetic transcriptions in IPA. The former are what's usually found in dictionaries and does not account for variance in dialects and speakers. The latter attempts to represent utterances as they are actually produced by speakers.

There's still some nuance that is lost in transcription but phonetic IPA transcriptions can achieve a pretty close approximation to the real utterances.

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

#22

Post by delgaudm »

As a voice actor, I am in LOVE with this idea, and have searched for this very thing a number of times. I'm really glad to see it created. Im constantly faced with saying words I have no idea how to pronounce correctly, and I spend far too much time trawling through youtube videos, or on forvo.com, and its ilk in the hopes of finding the word correctly pronounced.

I wonder, though, if it's a shortcoming of IPA that the generated pronunciations are not what I'd expect. Example, my hometown of Annapolis is here [1] by this tool: compared to how it's actually pronounced [2]

[1]https://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/speak.cgi?speak=%C9%99%CB%88n%... [2]https://youtu.be/1I71yL3SG80?t=11

As you can hear it's pretty far off, so much so I would be unable to rely on the computer generated version.

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

#23

Post by saurik »

saycheese wrote: post #9
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…

>> "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?

I am pretty sure the book I had was the "Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet".

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521637511

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

#24

Post by saurik »

pluma wrote: post #21
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…

One minor nit: it's important to distinguish between phonemic and phonetic transcriptions in IPA. The former are what's usually found in dictionaries and does not account for variance in dialects and speakers. The latter attempts to represent utterances as they are actually produced by speakers. There's still some nuance that is lost in transcription but phonetic IPA transcriptions can achieve a pretty close approxim…

This is true, but you make it sound like this is a response to and even a solution for my comment, when I was actually assuming a phonetic transcription: such transcriptions also vary in how narrowly they define the sound involved, and it is the nuance of sound to which I was commenting, as even in a very narrow phonetic transcription (with tons of marks to try to adjust the sounds of the phonemes), you just can't represent what a native speaker sounds like using these symbols without adjusting for language; and I guess we just have to disagree with how "pretty close" the result is, as when I thought about what I would want to use an IPA->speech tool to accomplish, they all involved vowel charts ;P.

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

#25

Post by DonaldFisk »

It would be interesting to learn the approach taken when developing this.

I sounds clear enough, but there are a few issues which would need to be resolved before I would use it. For example, when I entered "o:", which should be a long pure vowel, I got a diphthong. The first example [ˈnɑɹkoʊˌklɛpˈtɑkɹəsi] has the IPA for a General American accent but sounds more like Received Pronunciation to me. Some IPA characters aren't voiced at all. These might be fixable, but how easy this is depends on the implementation approach.

Decades ago, I developed a formant speech synthesizer (the details are here: http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/Formant%20Speech%20Synthesizer....). Formant speech synthesizers work by passing a pulsed or random input through a series of filters to generate speech sounds, and can be easily adapted to different accents and speakers. However, it is difficult to get them to sound natural, so they usually sound more like Daleks than people.

I've also done some rule-based text to speech. This works quite well for Standard English pronunciations in a Glasgow accent, the closest accent to English spelling and therefore the one which can be most reliably generated with the smallest number of exceptions.

More recent approaches to speech synthesis sound more natural but are limited to a particular accent and speaker. It's never a Glasgow accent, and developing one for a new speaker and accent is a major undertaking. Were I to switch accents to Received Pronunciation or General American, there would be many more exceptions to the pronunciation rules. Storing pronunciations in a dictionary only works for words stored in the dictionary.

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

#26

Post by DonaldFisk »

moontear wrote: post #14

Finally some closure: Worcestershire sauce is "wʊstərʃər" according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcestershire_sauce

In Received Pronunciation /r/ is only pronounced before vowels. Otherwise, it usually modifies the previous vowel. "wʊstəʃə" is a better phonetic transcription.

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

#27

Post by brownbat »

I always wanted to have a text-to-speech system that could generate novel accents, by taking just a couple parts of the IPA at a time and substituting other sounds.

Text-to-IPA might be easy enough with dictionaries, the swapping is trivial, but IPA-to-speech seems like a harder problem.

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

#28

Post by lottin »

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…

Quite true. I guess you would need different "profiles" corresponding to various languages or major dialects so that each symbol is interpreted correctly.

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

#29

Post by DonaldFisk »

delgaudm wrote: post #22

As a voice actor, I am in LOVE with this idea, and have searched for this very thing a number of times. I'm really glad to see it created. Im constantly faced with saying words I have no idea how to pronounce correctly, and I spend far too much time trawling through youtube videos, or on forvo.com, and its ilk in the hopes of finding the word correctly pronounced. I wonder, though, if it's a shortcoming of IPA that t…

The transcription you used /əˈnæpəlᵻs/ contains /ᵻ/ which doesn't appear to be a commonly used IPA character (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-close_central_unrounded_v...), and presumably wasn't encoded and so was absent from the output. Try /əˈnæpəlɪs/, which though it might not capture all the nuances of the local accent, at least sounds intelligible.

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

#30

Post by PepeGomez »

didymospl wrote: post #18
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…

It only works for English. Any other language seems to get mangled into English-like syllables.
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