Convert Text to Phoneme in Python

Simple phonemization of words and texts in many languages

Photo by Denisse Leon on Unsplash

By reading this piece, you will learn how to convert an input text string to its corresponding phonemes in Python. A phoneme represents the smallest unit of sound in a language. For example, the word

tab

consists of three phonemes:

/t/ /a/ /b/

The element b is distinguishable when compared to the following words:

• tag
• tan
• tap

/t/ /a/ | /b/
--------|----
/t/ /a/ | /g/
/t/ /a/ | /n/
/t/ /a/ | /p/

Phonemes are extremely useful as they are visual representations of speech sounds. Some speech-related machine learning tasks are based on phoneme transcription instead of text transcription.

There are many different phonetic notations, but the most commonly used system is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). IPA is an alphabetic system based on the Latin script. It uses symbols, which consist of both letters and diacritics. For example, the term IPA can be represented as

aɪ pʰiː eɪ

To keep it simple and short, this tutorial utilizes an open source Python package called phonemizer. Based on the…