Forum Discussion
Text to Speech - Sound help Phonetic spelling (make this sound like...)
Hi,
what am I doing wrong? I need this to say "con-duct" - not conduct.
like, conduct a training.
Do I have this programmed correctly? I have the <speak> and </speak> in the beginning/end of the text. below is what I am using....
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="ˈkuhn‑DUKT">conduct</phoneme>
2 Replies
Hello,
You’re close, but the way you’ve written the <phoneme> tag isn’t quite right. In SSML, the ph attribute must contain valid IPA characters, and the text inside the tag is just the display text. Right now, ˈkuhn‑DUKT isn’t valid IPA, so the engine falls back to the normal pronunciation of “conduct.”
Here’s how you can force “con‑duct”:
xml
<speak>
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="ˈkɒn.dʌkt">conduct</phoneme>
</speak>
ˈkɒn.dʌkt is the IPA for “con‑duct” (with stress on the first syllable).
Keep the <speak> wrapper around your SSML.
Make sure you’re using the correct IPA symbols not approximations like “kuhn.”
I've tested this on my end with and without your phonetic programming, and without I'm getting con-duct and with I'm getting kuhn-dukt, so I'd say you have it correct. For reference, I was using AI text-to-speech voice Laura - Enthusiast, Quirky Attitude.
