If you learn Chinese, you may have noticed how imperfect pinyin is as phonetic transcription system. Take the syllables “qiu” and “you”, for example. The final in both syllables is exactly the same, it is pronounced the same, but they are written differently. The same thing goes for the syllables like “wei” and “dui”. Or… Continue reading International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription for Chinese

We are happy to announce that we just released our updated database with pronunciations of words in British English. This is our biggest update for British English ever. The new database supports more than 130,000 unique English words. The pronunciation of each word was proofread manually! At the same time we updated the general algorithm… Continue reading More than 130,000 words in our database for British English

There’s an update in our English phonetic converter. Now for American English dialect we added an option to display transcription according to The American Heritage Dictionary phonetic spelling system. You can check the list of pronunciation symbols used in The American Heritage Dictionary here. The transcription obtained with our converter sometimes may be a bit… Continue reading The American Heritage Dictionary phonetic spelling system

We updated recently our German phonetic converter. Now it has 4 more settings that allow you to adjust the phonetic transcription to your liking: Note that for the last diphthong, the first option is used in Wikipedia, the second option is used in Duden’s Aussprachewörterbuch and the third option is used in Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch by… Continue reading New settings in German phonetic translator

Recently one user mentioned to us that the phonetic transcription is too small. So we added a setting that allows you to set the relative size of the phonetic transcription for the settings: You can fine tune the size of transcription from 75% to 115%. To change this setting go to “My account” -> “Customize… Continue reading Set relative size of phonetic transcription

We just added more text-to-speech voices for people who have subscription Premium. Google started adding more and more Neural2 voices to their text-to-speech service that we use on EasyPronunciation.com. Now there is a total of 54 Neural2 voices from Google, including: Additionally Amazon has just released a neural voice for Cantonese. They all sound fantastic.… Continue reading More neural text-to-speech voices

We are introducing a new way how you can test our phonetic converters if you don’t yet have a subscription on EasyPronunciation. Now when you click the button “Examples of phonetic transcription” located below the converter’s settings, the system will generate phonetic transcription for 3 short sample texts. The sample texts will be converted to… Continue reading A new way to test phonetic converters

This post is a bit different. It is not an announcement about an update on our website. Recently I received an email from someone I don’t know. In the email I was accused of exploiting people during the French Phonetic Dictionary project. The person obviously didn’t have all the information, so I would like to… Continue reading Free vs paid service – a story behind IPA phonetic translators

For the last month and a half we were working hard to prepare this new update. The new updated version of EasyPronunciation.com uses Bootstrap 5. It loads faster and is compatible with the latest browsers. We also replaced popovers in our IPA phonetic converters by the modals. That means more consistent and predictable behavior when… Continue reading Major design update of EasyPronunciation.com