Voice Synthesizer for the IPA?

Question

I'm looking for a voice synthesizer that allows for the input of a string of IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) characters and their pronunciation together, as in it would pronounce "you" if I typed in /ju/, or "you geek" if I typed in /'ju gi:k/. I want it to be useful for other languages as well, so it would pronounce "qaqambile" as /||α || αm 'bi le/. I've found plenty of good applets for the individual sounds online, so please don't send me any of those.

I've found plenty of applets that produce all the sounds individually, so please don't share any of those with me.
Also, no programs or sites that take English (or other individual languages) and convert them to IPA or pronounce them.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I don't think such a synthesizer exists, simply because the IPA doesn't provide all the information that one would need to synthesize speech. IPA doesn't generally encode prosodic information such as stress. So you would get a string of individual sounds, but you wouldn't get a real-sounding word.

In addition, the actual acoustic properties of sounds represented by certain IPA characters are actually relative to whatever language you are transcribing. For example, both Spanish and English have voiced and unvoiced stops, but the Voice Onset Time in Spanish for unvoiced stops is generally less than in English, as I recall. In other words, a Spanish [t], for example, is not really the same as an English [t], even though they are represented with the same IPA character.

I think your best bet is simply to pronounce the IPA transcription yourself, or ask a native speaker of whatever language you are interested in.

Answer 2

Really? Seven years since this question was asked and no-one on Earth has managed to implement this? Anyway, regarding drshorty's answer, yes, it would be language dependant in some way, but not particularly: If you were detailed enough about specific sounds e.g. the differences in Ts in English, Spanish, and other languages (English's are alveolar, usually aspirated, Spanish's are typically dental), then you'd be able to almost completely accurately synthesise the sounds produced.

Of course, it's all down to the accuracy of the IPA, which is as complex as it needs to be, really. There's an extremely diverse set of symbols in it, including one's that denote stress, aspiration, labialisation and other such things. The reason identical symbols tend to be used for similar but not identical sounds between languages is more down to simplifying the complete IPA transcription based on a specific languages phoneme set.

For example, the word "party" in English can be simply transcribed as /pɑɹti/, and the Spanish word "fiesta" becomes /fiɛstə/. Notice no indication of stress, vowel length, or even little things like rhotic that differ between dialects of specific languages (i.e. American English's Rs being rhotic, whereas British English's Rs generally aren't).

To be more detailed, you'd have the following:
"party" --> English (UK): [ˈpʰɑː.tʰi]
--> English (US): [ˈpɑɻ.ɾi]
"fiesta" --> Spanish: [fiˈɛs.t̪ə]

Notice how the /t/ used previously is now different for each transcription as they all differ slightly in pronunciation between languages and dialects. You'd really just have to be as detailed as possible in your transcription, or it will probably sound a little strange. As for implementing this idea, I really don't understand why this hasn't been done.

Answer 3

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