Blog about Pronunciation and Phonetic Transcription

We updated our server. The update improves the speed and the security on the website. If you are interested, in the near future we will expand our database for American English, adding more geographical and peoples’ names.

A short announcement for our customers in China. Now, in addition to Alipay we also accept Wechat Pay. For now, the payment by Alipay and Wechat are not recurring. For security reasons we don’t want to store payment information on our website.

We made several updates in our Italian phonetic translator. First, we started using the information on stress position in Italian words – that data only tremendously increased the quality of phonetic transcription. Second, the stress mark is now displayed in front of the syllable and not in front of the stressed vowel. You can also… Continue reading Updates in Italian phonetic translator

We added a new option in our English phonetic translator. It allows you to set how r-colored vowels in American English will be displayed. For example, the phonetic transcription of the word “car” can be displayed as: [ˈkɑ˞ ], [ˈkɑr], [ˈkɑɹ], or [ˈkɑʴ]

Some of our users were confused about Spanish dialects in our Spanish phonetic translator, since we don’t have an option to choose dialect directly. So we expanded the description of the translator. Now it explains which settings you need to choose so your text would be converted to European Spanish or Latin American Spanish.

We made some updates in our Chinese pinyin translator. First, the conversion of Chinese text to International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols is more accurate now. We used information from the book “The phonology of Standard Chinese” by San Duanmu to make sure that all pinyin syllables are transcribed correctly. We also updated the algorithm to… Continue reading Updates in Chinese pinyin translator

We expanded our glossary of terms related to phonetics, phonology and phonetic transcription. Here are some of the terms we added: allophone homograph broad transcription narrow transcription Quite often we receive emails asking us whether our IPA phonetic generators support “broad” or “narrow” transcription. Our English phonetic translator supports both – broad and narrow, most… Continue reading Phonetics and phonology glossary expanded

As you know, when you convert the text to phonetic transcription and choose the option to display the transcription above each word, the words are clickable. There are several options that you can adjust to choose what you will see when you click the word. Up until now the words were also clickable when you… Continue reading Words are clickable or not in phonetic converters

Up until now the punctuation marks were preserved when you converted a text to phonetic transcription. Yesterday we added a new option which allows you to either keep punctuation marks in phonetic transcription or remove them. If you choose an option to display the phonetic transcription under each paragraph of text or to display only… Continue reading An option to keep punctuation in phonetic transcription

We added several more voices on our website: 4 American English 1 British English 1 European Spanish The total number of high-quality text-to-speech voices on EasyPronunciation has reached 101. Enjoy!