6 ms·

Speak IPA – Text to Speech for International Phonetic Alphabet

102 points by bearbin 10y ago

carlob 10y ago
Doesn't seem to work in Safari, probably because the audio is a wav.
- mrec 10y ago
  If you mean you get prompted to download speaky.cgi, that happens in Firefox/Windows too.
saurik 10y ago
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 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 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.
- bearbin 10y ago
  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.
  - glup 10y ago
    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/ http://espeak.sourceforge.net/) or use espeak to generate IPA transcriptions for various languages.
  - echelon 10y ago
    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! :)
- saycheese 10y ago
  >> "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?
  - 10y ago
tyingq 10y ago
Didn'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%99r++nuz https://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/speak.cgi?speak=%27h%C3%A6k%C9...
Mizza 10y ago
It'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!
yoz-y 10y ago
Some time ago I've found out that the macOS say command does support IPA. However not all word seem to work.
pwdisswordfish 10y ago
This appears to be just a web wrapper around http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ http://espeak.sourceforge.net/, and not a very slick one either. For one, it could use the <audio> element instead of forcing me to download the sound file.
- yorwba 10y ago
  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).
fishnchips 10y ago
I checked a few examples from my native language (Polish) and they sound amusing at best.
compay 10y ago
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/ 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.
moontear 10y ago
Finally some closure: Worcestershire sauce is "wʊstərʃər" according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcestershire_sauce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcestershire_sauce
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  In Received Pronunciation /r/ is only pronounced before vowels. Otherwise, it usually modifies the previous vowel. "wʊstəʃə" is a better phonetic transcription.
  - vorg 10y ago
    Or even "wʊstʃə".
XaspR8d 10y ago
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.
- asaibx 10y ago
  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 https://github.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict [2] https://github.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict/releases https://github.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict/releases
aliceyhg 10y ago
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-transcription-converter#result 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.
- yorwba 10y ago
  > 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/ 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.
AceJohnny2 10y ago
Hm, it didn't deal too well with Llanfairpwllgwyngyll... https://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/speak.cgi?speak=%C9%ACan%CB%8Cvair+pu%C9%AC%CB%88%C9%A1w%C9%A8%CC%9En%C9%A1%C9%A8%CC%9E%C9%AC https://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/speak.cgi?speak=%C9%ACan%CB%8C... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll
amelius 10y ago
Back in the 80s, a friend of mine had a text-to-speech program running on a Z80 machine (I think), which sounded a lot like this.
delgaudm 10y ago
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%C3%A6p%C9%99l%E1%B5%BBs https://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/speak.cgi?speak=%C9%99%CB%88n%... [2]https://youtu.be/1I71yL3SG80?t=11 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.
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  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_vowel 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.
  - delgaudm 10y ago
    That is helpful! Thank you! I had copied the notation from wikipedia.
DonaldFisk 10y ago
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.txt 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.
brownbat 10y ago
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.
orthopteroid 10y ago
Hey cool! I finally have somewhere on the web that will make audio for my markov syllable-synthesis engine! http://blurtmime.appspot.com/ http://blurtmime.appspot.com/
msephton 10y ago
This is great, but I have to use Chrome to use it. I'd prefer to use Safari. Do you plan to let Wikipedia use this? It would be really useful on their site.

102 points by bearbin 10y ago

carlob 10y ago

Doesn't seem to work in Safari, probably because the audio is a wav.

mrec 10y ago
If you mean you get prompted to download speaky.cgi, that happens in Firefox/Windows too.

saurik 10y ago

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 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 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.

bearbin 10y ago
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.
- glup 10y ago
  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/ http://espeak.sourceforge.net/) or use espeak to generate IPA transcriptions for various languages.
- echelon 10y ago
  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! :)
saycheese 10y ago
>> "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?
- 10y ago

tyingq 10y ago

Didn'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%99r++nuz https://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/speak.cgi?speak=%27h%C3%A6k%C9...

Mizza 10y ago

It'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!

yoz-y 10y ago

Some time ago I've found out that the macOS say command does support IPA. However not all word seem to work.

pwdisswordfish 10y ago

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

yorwba 10y ago
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).

fishnchips 10y ago

I checked a few examples from my native language (Polish) and they sound amusing at best.

compay 10y ago

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/ 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.

moontear 10y ago

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

DonaldFisk 10y ago
In Received Pronunciation /r/ is only pronounced before vowels. Otherwise, it usually modifies the previous vowel. "wʊstəʃə" is a better phonetic transcription.
- vorg 10y ago
  Or even "wʊstʃə".

XaspR8d 10y ago

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.

asaibx 10y ago
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 https://github.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict [2] https://github.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict/releases https://github.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict/releases

aliceyhg 10y ago

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-transcription-converter#result 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.

yorwba 10y ago
> 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/ 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.

AceJohnny2 10y ago

Hm, it didn't deal too well with Llanfairpwllgwyngyll... https://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/speak.cgi?speak=%C9%ACan%CB%8Cvair+pu%C9%AC%CB%88%C9%A1w%C9%A8%CC%9En%C9%A1%C9%A8%CC%9E%C9%AC https://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/speak.cgi?speak=%C9%ACan%CB%8C... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll

amelius 10y ago

Back in the 80s, a friend of mine had a text-to-speech program running on a Z80 machine (I think), which sounded a lot like this.

delgaudm 10y ago

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%C3%A6p%C9%99l%E1%B5%BBs https://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/speak.cgi?speak=%C9%99%CB%88n%... [2]https://youtu.be/1I71yL3SG80?t=11 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.

DonaldFisk 10y ago
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_vowel 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.
- delgaudm 10y ago
  That is helpful! Thank you! I had copied the notation from wikipedia.

DonaldFisk 10y ago

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.txt 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.

brownbat 10y ago

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.

orthopteroid 10y ago

Hey cool! I finally have somewhere on the web that will make audio for my markov syllable-synthesis engine! http://blurtmime.appspot.com/ http://blurtmime.appspot.com/

msephton 10y ago

This is great, but I have to use Chrome to use it. I'd prefer to use Safari. Do you plan to let Wikipedia use this? It would be really useful on their site.