Welcome to Phonemizer’s documentation!

  • phonemizer allows simple phonemization of words and texts in many languages.

  • Provides both the phonemize command-line tool and the Python function phonemizer.phonemize().

  • It is based on four backends: espeak, espeak-mbrola, festival and segments. The backends have different properties and capabilities resumed in table below. The backend choice is let to the user.

    • espeak-ng is a Text-to-Speech software supporting a lot of languages and IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) output.

    • espeak-ng-mbrola uses the SAMPA phonetic alphabet instead of IPA but does not preserve word boundaries.

    • festival is another Tex-to-Speech engine. Its phonemizer backend currently supports only American English. It uses a [custom phoneset][festival-phoneset], but it allows tokenization at the syllable level.

    • segments is a Unicode tokenizer that build a phonemization from a grapheme to phoneme mapping provided as a file by the user.

To reference phonemizer in your own work, please cite the following JOSS paper.

@article{Bernard2021,
  doi = {10.21105/joss.03958},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03958},
  year = {2021},
  publisher = {The Open Journal},
  volume = {6},
  number = {68},
  pages = {3958},
  author = {Mathieu Bernard and Hadrien Titeux},
  title = {Phonemizer: Text to Phones Transcription for Multiple Languages in Python},
  journal = {Journal of Open Source Software}
}

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