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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

#31

Post by echelon »

bearbin wrote: post #5
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…

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 is really cool! Thanks for sharing with us!

Is this using parametric synthesis? (It doesn't sound concatenative.) Do you have a background in speech, signal processing, or audio, and is this just a passing interest, or something you want to continue to explore?

I've been teaching myself speech algorithms and methods off and on for the past six months ago. Recently I developed a concatenative Donald Trump text to speech engine (I've posted about it in the past), but the samples aren't great and it doesn't use proper unit selection. I'm trying to apply ML to generate a massive set of smooth n-phones that concatenate well together.

I'd definitely like to exchange contact info if you're into speech synthesis long term. My info is in my profile.

In any case, really cool project! :)

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

#33

Post by vorg »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #26
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.

Or even "wʊstʃə".

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

#34

Post by 3131s »

saurik wrote: post #24
pluma wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> This is true, but you make it sound like this is a response to and even a solution for my comment

I think it's a suitable response. There is enough allophonic variation among speakers of a single language that undoubtedly someone perfectly reciting a narrow IPA transcription could be taken as a plausible native speaker. Even for your purposes (though I'm still not clear on what type of task your envisioning) the IPA could still be useful as an intermediary layer of abstraction, as in storing a mapping by language of IPA vowel symbols to the exact formants required.

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

#35

Post by 3131s »

PepeGomez wrote: post #30
didymospl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you talking about this project or the IPA generally?

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

#36

Post by asaibx »

XaspR8d wrote: post #15

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.

This repo[1] contains IPA dictionaries for 17 languages, including English, Spanish, and Chinese in JSON/CSV/XML/plain text format.

If you really want to find puns programmatically, the releases section[2] has a ready-made package with homonyms in all the languages, including English. It should be trivial to make an online service that searches through this file for matches on particular words.

[1] https://github.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict [2] https://github.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict/releases

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

#37

Post by yorwba »

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #11

This appears to be just a web wrapper around http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ , and not a very slick one either. For one, it could use the element instead of forcing me to download the sound file.

This doesn't seem to use espeak, since while the --ipa flag can make espeak output IPA characters, it can't take IPA input (or I don't know the correct incantation).

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

#38

Post by yorwba »

aliceyhg wrote: post #16

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…

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

http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ can already do this, however Chinese support is currently flaky at best when using characters, because different pronunciations are not disambiguated based on context. Giving it Pinyin to work with is enough to fool me non-native speaker, though.

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

#39

Post by PepeGomez »

3131s wrote: post #35
PepeGomez wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you talking about this project or the IPA generally?

This "project" specifically. It conflates ɾ and t and it ignores most non-english IPA letters.

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

#40

Post by delgaudm »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #29
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.

That is helpful! Thank you! I had copied the notation from wikipedia.
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